


the trail of their names

by snagov



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst, Desperation, Devotion, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, Partially epistolary, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Schrödinger's Lost Expedition, Self-Denial, Slow Burn, Temporary Character Death, canon divergence - some live/not everyone dies, how do you reenter society after five years frozen at sea, self-flagellating francis crozier, sliding doors - franklin expedition style, tuunbaq? what tuunbaq
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:08:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 53,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24091084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: In our universe, all possibilities must exist. For the men ofErebusandTerror, locked into the ice in September 1846, two paths lay ahead. Both of them are true.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 150
Kudos: 141





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a WIP that I estimate to clock in around 100k when all is said and done. As of the posting of the first chapter, 40k is already written and the remainder is fully outlined/plotted. I aim to update about once a week or once every two weeks, depending on life.

_"The gods are fugitive guests of literature._ _  
__They cross it with the trail of their names and are soon gone."_ _  
__Roberto Calasso_

* * *

Once, long ago, two ships sailed from Greenhithe. They never came back. 

When we looked, there was nothing. The earth and the ice had erased them, deleted them. Offered the sea and the shore to us as white as a blank sheet with nothing written upon it. We remember and tell their story, over and over again, always getting it a little bit wrong, building myths upon both legends and bitter fact. 

Did Arthur exist? We don’t have his bones. We do not have the stones from his castle, his lost sword. He may not have been a king. He never touched the metal of armor. There was no Excalibur. Merlin is a fabrication. Guinevere came in later stories and Lancelot too. Did Arthur exist? There is a point where the historians run out of record. There is a point when the archaeologists must put their trowels down and give up their dig. The rest is blank. Empty. A vast swathe of whiteness without ink. This is where mythology must pick up the trail of their names. Keep their tales told. Fill in the blanks with words like mortar. 

We have only a few bones and the ships in their graves. A lost coin purse. A teaspoon. Their signatures and names. We'll try again and keep them alive for a little while longer. I'll tell you what I know.

Come, let us talk of complicated men.

* * *

_Belfast, Ireland  
_ _1802_

  
  


“Where does it end?”

The early morning fog had hung heavily over the seawater. Pebbles crunched beneath his boots and reeds tickled his legs. He will remember later that the air had felt nearly as wet as the ocean itself, as if it might become rain at any moment. There was nothing but green and grey behind him and nothing but blue before. So much blue. It had felt as if it might go on forever. 

"Depends on where you're going," his father said, squinting into the pale world. It was a practical answer. His father only ever gave practical answers. 

Where was he going? Francis hadn't been sure, at least not beyond this journey. They had spent summers on the shore. His mother had said that moving to the shore was everything they would ever need, bread and butter, mother and father. But it wasn’t everything. Instead, the old house howled with the wind from the top of the dunes. Francis, with his cheeks red and shirt tucked in, would go out with metal shovels to reclaim what was theirs from the sand. Eons of sand and silver birch surrounded them. The waves of the Atlantic lapped up to greet the shoreline, festooned with whitecaps and zebra mussels, dead alewives and driftwood. Seagulls called to one another, their feathers spotted the ground. Francis had watched it constantly. When he was inside, he kept an eye on the sea through the windows while sitting at the battered kitchen table and picking out the potatoes from his bowl of soup.

“Come, Francis,” his father said, beckoning to the dock. Water rocked the waiting ship and Francis looked up with wide eyes. He had never been aboard a ship before, not for lack of wanting. The masts were tall and dwarfed him. His legs weren’t ready for the sea, not yet, though that will come. Look at how young he had been once, cheeks still ruddy and fat. Eyes still bright. 

He had stood in the cool shadow of the sails and watched the way his father gently took his mother's hand as they walked. A memory made, printed on him like a daguerreotype, of what love and joy might look like someday.

The first time Francis boards a ship he is six years old. His lawyer father had gripped his small fingers in soft hands, made for good penmanship and never for ropes. It had been a short trip across the Irish Sea. Francis had stood on deck, feet firmly planted against the rollicking of the wet world around him, and turned his face into the rush of air. They had made good time and the wind came quick into his mouth. Later, he would remember laughing. Would remember a boundless joy that came out on the water, away from the dull bricks and predictable roads that made up his home. 

When he had left for the navy, seven years later, his mother would give him her Bible. It had the pages marked from her favorite passages. He promised he would read it and keep it dry.

Memory makes a strange feast. 

* * *

_Whalefish Islands, Disko Bay, Greenland  
_ _July 1845_

  
  


It has been a month since Francis Crozier has seen Britain and he _still_ does not know what's been done with his tea. He spares a miserably quirked brow toward the ships in the bay, half a shadow upon the horizon, trying to imagine where his Fortnum & Masons had skittered off to. It doesn't matter; the tea had either made it onboard or it had not and, out here, there's nothing to do for it but scowl. 

The air is cool already, even in the height of summer. He has visited Disko Bay before, a traditional starting position for explorations into the North American arctic coastline. They have all sought the Passage and all have been denied. Four-hundred years of stymied searches and icy fingers. John Cabot had come west in 1497, then Gomes and Frobisher, Gilbert and Davis. The list of frustrated names goes on with too many memorable deeds to remember any of them at all. Francis’ own name has been on that list before. He'd been young still, scarcely twenty-five, when he had sailed west with Captain William Parry in 1821, damp and cold and fascinated aboard the HMS _Fury._ He'd even returned with Parry a few years later, this time on the _Hecla,_ and had watched _Fury_ sink in dark waters off the bleak and unforgiving backdrop of Somerset Island. Glancing around now, taking the measure of the long sun on the small skerries and islands of the bay, how it glints upon the growlers and small icebergs still present, Francis feels a shadow of unease settle over him. This is how all stabs toward the Passage begin, in the cupped arms of Disko Bay, and nothing is changed. If anything, the winds seem cooler and he looks westward with an uncertain heart. 

He has an awful feeling about this expedition.

Few of their number know what waits across Baffin Bay. He has not forgotten. The land here belongs only to those who were born to it, and even their numbers are few. The flat earth, by turns grey and pale brown, dotted with ice and snow and with no trees to give shelter. No wood to chop for fire. There is only ice and shale, only water and hunger. He self-consciously drops a hand to the slight round of his stomach, wondering how long boot leather must be chewed before it can be swallowed. 

_Sir John would be the one to ask, I suppose._

It had taken a month and a half to sail to Disko Bay. From their dock at Greenhithe, in the mid-morning sun, the HMS _Erebus_ and her sister ship, the HMS _Terror,_ had been pulled into the Thames and set free. A storm had slowed their start, setting Francis' already uneasy nerves on edge. They had waited out the storm, hearing that the Admiralty had sent word to double back and take the protected route through the Channel instead.

“I would advise against it, Sir John,” Francis had said. “We have lost a week already and the Arctic does not wait for our timetable.”

Franklin had nodded, weighing Francis' opinion. “I believe you might be right. We’ll keep the course originally assigned. Our first step into a grand adventure." 

Francis had hoped then that the consideration might be for himself and his own opinion; now, as he feels the unfortunate chill linger in the summer air, it hangs darkly on him. Sir John will stay the course, storms and ice be damned. _Trouble is,_ he thinks, _the land here has no thought for men's plans._

Men have been felled by white whales and white birds and white ice before; Francis is not fool enough to have forgotten this. 

A mosquito noses at him, as big as a horsefly. He swats at it, slapping the thing dead upon his arm. The blood that stains the fabric is his own.

He makes a few careful, quick sketches in his book. Most of the flora is known to him. There's Arctic cottongrass, which Francis knows the Inuit use as wicks for seal oil lamps. Juniper berries and yellow-leaved crowberries. There's garden angelica to help the stomach and dandelions all over. Mostly, there is rock and there is lichen. Looking up from the sparse land, he finds little to pierce the vast sky but the masts. The assistant surgeon for HMS _Erebus_ , Harry Goodsir, sits nearby in perfect focus and contemplation, diligently sketching mollusks and seaweed. The young surgeon is perhaps twenty-five, the same age Francis had been when he had first come west. His company is quiet and more agreeable than most. From the shore, it is easy to watch their transport ship, _Baretto Junior_ , disappear into the haze and distance. The last crates of supplies have been offloaded, brought aboard both _Erebus_ and _Terror._ The ten oxen have been slaughtered and their butchered meat well-stored. Every man of their one-hundred and twenty-nine has put ink to paper and troubled to write a letter, bearing back the last bits of themselves before they might come out the other side. Francis watches the transport ships sail east. How long might it be until he sails in that direction again? They have no eastward bound mark on their map; it might be an age. 

When he does return, he will not be the same man. Francis knows that, even as most of the crew yet do not. He doesn't know how it will twist him but the ice always does. Even if whole and healthy, you do not ever escape the Arctic unscathed. In the midst of summer, he finds there is within him an unshakeable winter. The cheer and excitement is catching enough. Sir John Franklin's sturdy laugh rings out across the docked ships and in the evening, the wine flows freely within _Erebus_ ' wardroom. _Terror_ is different. Different ship, different captain, different city. Where Franklin dines with the wardroom officers of _Erebus_ each night, Francis eats alone. A ship’s captain should be set apart. He knows this. Believes this. Still, the right decisions don’t always make for good company. 

He is terribly lonely. Sir John makes the effort, sending invitation after invitation for Francis to come to his table and choke down another over-salted dinner. The dinners invariably go the same way each time. Franklin will wander in his thoughts to how he was done wrong in Van Diemen’s Land and read passages from the pamphlet he intends to publish, once returned victorious from the Passage with a cleared name and resounding respect. James Fitzjames, that infuriating creature, will shake his curls from his forehead and pick yet another overly-embroidered story from his collection. All as true as fairytales and big fish stories, Francis is quite certain. He might drive a knife into his eardrums just to drown out the sound. 

“You’ve got a look on you,” a voice comes. The low grizzle of it is well-known. When Francis glances over, a mild brow raised, it is to find his Ice Master, Thomas Blanky, drawing near. Tom spits on the ground and lights a clay pipe. 

"Another sundog. In July. It is a bad omen, friend." 

"Aye."

"Tell me what you know then. You have news."

Tom is quiet a moment. "Afraid it's been cold. Not a good summer. Weather's severe and the wind's easterly. Though, in talking, reports are there's an early break up of ice. The fish come good and fast and whalers been as far north as the Women Isles."

Francis nods, peering north. The sun is bright and unrelenting. "I fear we will have no time to judge for ourselves."

"Aye." 

"Don't mind me, I'm in an ill humor, Tom."

"Good cup of tea will fix you up, right as rain."

Francis gives a smirk, raising an eyebrow. "Supposing I _had_ tea." He looks back again to the ships, wondering what other tangles might sit in their hulls. “Or sugar, for that matter. I should not have come."

"So why did you?" 

_Why did I?_ It’s strange how the cold sticks to you. How you can loathe a place and yet belong to it. Francis doesn’t belong back there. Not in the neat rows of houses, not in the fine dining rooms and plush theater seats. The bitter north is a grimace of his past and future. The cold will strip him down again; the leather from his boiled boots will be stuck between his teeth. No man in his right mind would return. Yet, he had. Francis knows he always will. The severe edges of the Earth have always claimed him and called him home. The other base fact of the matter, stripped away of all excuse and invention, is the melancholy that has found him. Disquiet has been his friend before, always and often, but its claws are sharper now, digging deeper into him. The answer has always been to take to the sea again. When Francis finds that the days grow longer and greyer, when it's harder than ever to swing his legs out from bed and stagger to a cup of tea, then he finds a way back aboard a ship. There is something in it. The poets and authors will do the feeling better justice than he ever could. The artists with their brushes, their oil paints, dotting white tips on rough waves. Yes, they'll explain it better than he can, but he knows that the water is a better treatment than anything else he's found. There's an endless promise in it, a lack of definition and boundary. Once out on the water, once the little scrap of land has disappeared from view, you might be anywhere and continue on indefinitely. There are no tall brick houses to block the sun. Not here. 

Out here, the only thing between him and God is a bit of time.

Tom puffs on the pipe; the smell of the packed tobacco is soothing. Some little smoke always clings to him, from his pipes and cheroots. It feels like home, whatever that might mean now. They had lost sight of Duncansby Head in June, and with that lighthouse, all of Europe. It had jutted out against the sea, impervious and unchanging. The sea is a riot of treachery; the lighthouse is immovable. They always have been unyielding, stretching out, back to the very first one. Homer tells us that the very first lighthouse was invented by Palamedes of Nafplio, in-between moments of besieging Troy. But who can trust Homer? Instead, we can look to more established records. The Lighthouse of Alexandria was one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. It had been built on Pharos, a small and rocky island in the Nile Delta. It was raised from blocks of pale stone, a giant mirror erected at the top. They reflected the sun during the day, lit fires at night to guide the sailors home. 

He hopes that they might see it again. _Doubtful at best._ He has never been able to resist the siren song of nowhere. He may be an unpleasant and difficult man aboard a ship but he knows his place on the margins. He had looked up from the water to the city, he saw the buildings crowd up to the banks of the river. Life goes on. Houses are bought and sold, weddings are planned, bread is baked. There is a machine at work here and no place in it for him. 

Why did he come? _Because I was told to; because the water is the only place where I have ever made sense._

Going to sea the first time had not been his choice but Francis has always fallen into line, taking orders like a bullet. Stiff upper lip, straight back, keep your nose down. His father had wanted a boy in uniform. George Crozier had taught Francis to shoot using his old flintlock muskets. Had said, _I killed a man or two with this in the colonies._ Francis' young hand had shaken as he'd touched the metal, the lock, stock, and barrel cold against his skin. He still remembers the old firelock as it had looked, hanging in his father's office, monument to his ability to kill. Francis had hated looking at the thing. (He had learned to shoot it anyway.) When his father had pushed the Royal Navy enlistment papers over, Francis hadn't hesitated to sign his name. Thirteen years old and newly bound for the HMS _Hamadryad._ Sailing had come easily to him. The orders were simple; the water was wide. The days were only maintenance and repetition. Constant drills, constant waiting. Hurry up and wait. Eat a little hardtack, a little water. Some beans perhaps, on the good days. The ocean is unpredictable. It likes to drown men, pull them down under the waves to keep it company.

He and Tom fall into silence as they watch the shore. Men fish and pull nets up, finding mollusks and crabs. Some gut the fish right there on the rocks, spilling the guts and blood all over the stone. From a distance, a man in a long dark coat turns toward them, walking slowly and with purpose. 

"Here comes the commander then," Tom says around the smoke in his mouth.

“I cannot bloody stand him,” Francis mutters, not for the first time.

“So you keep sayin'," Tom laughs and raises a grey brow. Commander James Fitzjames approaches them with the wind in his infernal curls and color high in his cheeks from the walk. Francis finds he has some bitter words for the man already, even before he has opened his mouth. 

"Francis," Fitzjames says, nodding briefly. "Mr. Blanky." His voice is rich, the confidence within it is grating. Francis keeps his lips pressed in a thin red line and says nothing. 

"Commander," Tom nods. 

Fitzjames turns to Francis. "Ready then?"

"You've the equipment?"

"I have," Fitzjames says, gesturing to the bag with him, packed to the brim with Lloyd's intensity instruments. Francis grits his teeth, choking on his own pride. It is impossible to know why the Admiralty, in particular, the Passage-hungry second secretary Sir John Barrow, had insisted on putting Fitzjames in charge of taking magnetic surveys. Francis should have been the natural choice. He had spent four capable years in the Antarctic, a gaussmeter never far from his hands. Francis bites his tongue, something embarrassing and raw on it about his election to the Royal Society nearly twenty years ago. He had been only thirty-two. The same age, Francis realizes with a seeping fury and hot shame, as the smooth-faced and false-fronted Fitzjames is now. 

He has never before felt so old nor so Irish.

“Let’s get on with it then.”

The small structure they’ve cobbled together can barely bear the weight of the word _observatory._ It’s spare and ramshackle, destined to fall apart not long after they leave. They walk the short distance, Fitzjames leading the way and Francis wondering what in Heaven or on Earth he might have done to deserve such punishment. He is in the middle of recounting his sins when the commander stops short, nearly bringing Francis into collision with his broad-shouldered back. 

“And what the Devil - “

“Well, I’ll say, look at that,” Fitzjames cries, pausing with delight. Look then and beyond. Francis squints into the brightness. There’s a pair of kayaks tied up here, brought up upon the shore. Their green paint peeling off and years scraped into the wood. “You know, Francis, I’ve never been on one. Suppose we - “ 

Francis only glares. “I do _not_ think - "

“Come, where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Dead and buried, God rest its soul,” Francis mutters beneath his breath. Fitzjames watches him, his eyes as dark as pitch and just as gripping. It is impossible to look away under the stare; Francis can feel the measure of himself being taken. What is he but a series of numbers, checkmarks and tallies, pros and cons? In Fitzjames' calculating and oddly quiet look, he wants to pull the covers over or to pull the shade down, knowing that he is being seen and being found lacking. Stranger still, more than his own uneasy self, is this inability to reconcile these stilled moments with the other man. He cannot make heads nor tails of Fitzjames. Consider measurements, an equation to solve for the unknown. Day after day, Fitzjames tells empty tales and lifts a proud chin. His curls shine better than a polished mirror, his coat more well-brushed than a cherished poodle. Yet, these moments, when something sharp and considering quiets his features, there's a different man looking out at Francis than the one he knows. 

He cannot understand it.

The moment goes too long. Fitzjames gives a short huff and shrugs, seeming to have bored already of Francis. “Suit yourself.” He looks again to the canoes. In a moment, Fitzjames appears to make a decision. He shrugs off his fine coat and folds it carefully, setting it down upon a large rock. It’s with somewhat less care that he pulls his leather boots from his feet and drops his hands to his laces. Francis stares on with horror as Fitzjames strips his breeches from his thighs and kicks them to the side, drops his waistcoat too. There, in only his shirtsleeves and in sight of Francis and God and the rest of the expedition, pulls a kayak into the water and scrambles in. 

"By God, man, what has _possessed_ you - " Francis hisses. His tongue is between his teeth and on his retinas is the sight of Fitzjames stripped down, wearing a thin shirt with the hem to his knees and strong, pale calves bare below. He closes his eyes, sucking in a breath, watching with a dour frown as Fitzjames pilots the small craft through the icy water, the sun bearing down upon his shifting broad shoulders as they work. His hair, black as sin most days, seems almost a warm chestnut in the daylight. 

Francis knows where his thoughts have gone and shame colors his skin. He looks away. 

Here he is again, just a foolish old man.

* * *

_HMS Terror_ _  
__September 1846_

"Of all the hardships of the Discovery Service," Francis mutters, pulling on his jacket. "This may be the toughest."

"It's three courses tonight and a dessert,” his young steward, Thomas Jopson, says. He has a deft and practiced hand with dressing Francis, familiar with the captain's idiosyncrasies over four years in the south together. In the Antarctic, yes, on this very ship. Sometimes, when Francis lingers over his fingers of whiskey, listening to Jopson fuss about the Great Cabin and watching familiar fires flicker on familiar walls, he almost can believe that they are still upon that journey. That the ice in the water is Antarctic ice, that when he jostles into the little rowboat and climbs aboard _Erebus,_ it might be Sir James Clark Ross waiting with an open grin and gossip about penguins. 

“It'll be over before you know it, Captain," Jopson assures him. 

"Not if Fitzjames is with us. We'll have to hear his whole saga of policing that massive guano deposit off Namibia. Or the time he got shot by the Chinese." Francis pulls at his sleeves, already irritated. "I'm inclined to put the food in my ears."

I haven't settled the matter of spirits for tonight, sir," Jopson says. "Sir John abstains, of course, and it's Allsopp's for the rest. But is there anything special you require, sir?"

Francis can list many things he requires. A bed big enough to roll over in, the smell of green grass. To be warm to the bone. Red meat and freshly-baked bread. A swirl of milk in his tea, the pinkish color of the hawthorn petals that had lined the path near his childhood home. The warmth of another body pressed to his side, rocking him with steady breath. Wide wide water, clear and open and westward bound. 

"More open water, clear to the Pacific. And then we can go home."

"We're close, sir."

"Careful how you use that word, _close_ ," Francis murmurs, staring out the windows of the Great Cabin to the dark and half-frozen sea. The sky is clear and the stars violent above. "This is the Discovery Service. _Close_ is nothing. It's worse than nothing. It's worse than anything in the world."

* * *

When he pays attention, he finds he is always being watched. The HMS _Erebus_ has found a commander in a young boast of a fellow and Francis has loathed James Fitzjames from the start. The impossibly shined nails, the well-set black curls. Even the man's voice, deep with the fairest trace of an upper-class lisp, seems affected and grating. His eyes are dark, as dark as his hair, and always trained on Francis. Keen and focused, as if waiting to catch the slightest give, to find the smallest weakness. 

So Francis watches back. 

_The man is a bloody peacock. And a damn fool._ He shifts uneasily. Sitting so near Fitzjames, in easy distance for a comparison, he feels dull and grey. His awkwardness is a disgraceful stain he's never been able to vomit up, no matter how far he might stick his too-short fingers down his throat. He cannot pick it out from between his teeth. No matter how Francis twists and turns and holds himself, he is never at ease. He stands wrong. Holds his arms wrong. When he is not in uniform, his clothes are always wrong, whether they're the wrong color, wrong fabric, wrong fit. His voice, worst of all, always betrays him, slipping back into an Irish brogue when he isn't looking. 

The commander is telling the officers a story. Francis has heard them all before. Sitting around the table of _Erebus_ ' wardroom, he is certain this is either the fourth or fifth telling of this particular variant, yet every other officer in the room leans forward, raptly listening. He is, perhaps, a good storyteller. Francis may grant that much, if grudgingly at best. Still, the irritation sticks under his starched collar. _I fear that I may grind my damned molars down if I must listen to one more of these damned fairytales._

"... I'd just loaded a rocket and aimed… when I was pierced. Single musket ball. Size of a cherry." Fitzjames holds up a hand, marking the size of the bullet that had (regrettably) not killed him. "Passed clean through my arm and kept on in, making a third wound here, entering my chest." His elegant fingers sweep to this point of his chest, indicating the bullet's trajectory.

"Like the shot that killed Lord Nelson at Trafalgar," Lieutenant Edward Little volunteers, paying more attention to the ridiculous tall tale than the mess on his plate.

Fitzjames nods almost eagerly. " _And_ ," he continues, "had it not used up most of its energy on my arm, yes, I might have ended - same as he."

Francis glares at nothing in particular. At the fine china of his plate, at the greyish meat he pushes about it. At the dark oak of the wardroom's paneling. He might snap his fork in two. He has compiled a long and inventive list of tortures he would prefer to these wretched dinners. Thumbscrews being driven slowly. Having ropes tied to each sturdy limb and horses driven to the four cardinal directions, pulling his bones apart. His blood drunk down by a thousand leeches. Being keelhauled beneath _Terror,_ broken against the wood and metal, drowned in the deep and left to dry. 

When he finishes his list, Fitzjames is _still_ talking.

"Tell us about Birdshit Island, why don't you, James?" Francis snaps, flicking a cold glance across the table. "That's a capital story."

He lifts his glass and drops his glance to the drink instead, but not before catching the bruised expression that flashes across Fitzjames' face. Fitzjames rarely stops watching him; this time, the look could turn a man to stone. 

* * *

He often imagines what it feels like to be deep below water. 

Consider the fathoms below him. He does not know how deep this water goes, how far he might sink. How long would it take his bones to reach the abyssal floor, submerged in that place of endless night? It is as good as being buried there, no light will creep through. There would be little sound there, in this subterranean nightmare. The quiet would resound, striking like a scream. No sight, no sound. Only nothingness. He would exist, pressed down by thousands of tons of open water, frozen and silent. 

It calls to him sometimes. It calls to everyone at one time or another. We linger in our chambers near the sea, listening for human voices to call us back. We try to give the water a name, someone who we can blame for the storms and the temptation. Poseidon, we call it. Triton, even. The Irish, as Francis well knows, blame Lir for their water troubles. It doesn't matter what name you give it, how you shift the blame. Something in him knows there's an old reckoning that we have not yet settled, the sea cast us forth once and it will, when it chooses, call us back home. 

Sailors are a superstitious sort; he is no different. He puts his faith where he needs to. In the ocean, in God, in _Terror_ herself. The trouble is that doubt shows up whether you want it to or not. Doubt doesn’t wait to be invited in, it has fewer manners than a vampire. No, doubt shows up without asking. When we are accused of doubting, we stand there aching and open, squeezing the doubt from our wet shirts and feeling for the cracks in the boat. _But I tried,_ we cry, _I did, I did, I did. You must believe me._

Tonight, the ship is calm. Orderly. He marks the passage of time with the bells. One bell, two bells, three bells, four. The quiet hum of the locomotive engine beneath the deck. Francis looks out at the water. There are plates of ice now, as round as pancakes, spinning and floating on the water's dark surface. The world is quiet here. 

Still, doubt persists. Francis cannot shake the uneasy memory of something he had seen while at Disko Bay. A mirage most likely. A hallucination at worst. 

It had been late at night, the sun dipping low enough to allow some little relief in the bright summer. Francis had gone for a walk, trying to savor the feeling of solid ground. They would leave in the morning, sailing from this western shore of Greenland and crossing over into Lancaster Sound. Excitement thrummed among many; for most, this would be their first sighting of the true arctic. Francis had walked in his long coat, starlight shining from gold buttons and polished boots. His peaked cap set low upon his head, covering his cold-reddened ears. He held his hands behind his back and moved along through the detritus and stone. It had been ebb tide, the water had pulled back from the foreshore and eelgrass and rockweed lingered upon the sand. Seashells too. Francis picked one up, a smooth piece of abalone, and tucked it away in a pocket. He collects a memento from each voyage, always a little piece of a land he'll likely never see again. Abalone and cowrie, nautilus and conch. Little treasures everywhere.

Then, there had been a splash in the water. He'd stopped suddenly, tangling his ankles in surprise, and looked out at the sea. It had been a woman, he was certain of it. Strange and quiet, staring directly at him. She had not blinked. Now, a full year later, he still remembers her bare feet and drenched dress. That mottled skin, pale and unpleasant. The color of the underbellies of frogs; the color of maggots. Francis had recoiled at her sunken eyes, her open mouth, the way her hands pressed into the water over and over and over again, as if trying to climb out.

He'd blinked and the water was quiet. The sea only offered waves and ice with no woman to be found. As he had stared at the vacant spot, a figure had moved out of the shadows. A figure in a similar coat of navy wool, a familiar littering of medals over his breast. With dark hair that curled and fell in all the ways that Francis knew far too well. James Fitzjames hesitated in front of him, surprise and uneasiness coloring his features. He had looked to the water and back to Francis again before shaking the peculiar quietness off and offering a jocular greeting. 

Now, a year later, watching the leads close up by inches and feet, by yards and miles, he still wonders. Should he have asked? Had Fitzjames seen it? He doesn't know. The time to have asked is long since past. He cannot change it; time cannot be grabbed sternly by the shoulders and marched backward. 

* * *

The others file into _Erebus'_ Great Cabin, taking their seats. Francis doesn’t look up from the command meeting's agenda. A migraine hovers behind his left eye. There is a blurry spot on his vision, the pain is a promise, it will come soon. 

Sir John Franklin opens the meeting, bringing them to attention. "As well, we know that the ice ahead is increasing dramatically, both in thickness and amount. But we must be nearly in sight of King William Land. Then it isn't but another two-hundred miles before we can pick up the western charts and draw in this final piece of the puzzle once and for all."

"Our situation is more dire than you may understand."

"Please, go ahead, Francis."

"That is not just ice ahead. It is the _pack._ And you are proposing that we cross it. In September. Even with leads, it could take us weeks of picking our way through it. We may not have weeks."

"What, weeks at most?" Fitzjames asks. Francis swallows, uneasy in the throat. Fitzjames is striking and he cannot ever quite ignore it. The man's long throat unnerves him and his own runs dry. He thinks suddenly of the able seamen who share bunks, he knows all the stories. It is not spoken of, he has never done it, he has never been offered. Who would ever offer to him? (His own reticence is a comfort, he will never be risked. _Lead me not into temptation_.)

He shakes the thought off. "You've seen the sundogs, Graham?" He asks. "How many have there been now?"

"Three," Lieutenant Gore replies quietly.

"It's already a colder year than last."

"I've been to the Arctic - " Franklin says. 

"On _foot_ ," Francis interrupts, tightening his fingers. "And you nearly starved. Not all of your men returned. I say this with all due honor."

"For God's sake, Francis," Fitzjames raises a dark and abominably strong brow. Just the picture of a modern gentleman. Francis' fist twitches harder. What if he pushed the man? Shoved him backward into the table, the very wall? Laid a punch into that disdainful, mocking face? If he could push something out of it, anything out of it, than this affected mask. It _must_ be a mask, he is certain of this. Sometimes, when Fitzjames is watching him with those careful, dark eyes, he can nearly get a glimpse of the truth of the man underneath. But then the light shifts and that practiced smile is back, empty and ideal. 

Just like now.

"A captain is due his candor," Franklin says, silencing his commander. He turns back to Francis. "So, what would you propose instead? Wait out winter here?"

"No. The exact shape of King William Land is unknown. As we discovered with Cornwallis Land, it could be King William _Island_ , with a chance to sail around its eastern shore."

"Yes, but east would add miles. We might not be out this year after all."

"But only because _Erebus_ is lame. If we consolidate all our coal on the less-damaged ship, we'd have enough to go for broke and get east of King William Land, possibly around it, before winter. It's our best, and probably only, chance. 

"Yes," Tom agrees, finally adding another voice of reason to the room. "We should go for broke."

"Abandon _Erebus_? Is - is that what you're saying?"

"If it is a dead-end, we can over-winter in complete safety out of the pack in some sheltered harbor. We retrace our steps come spring, tired of one another, no doubt, but _alive_."

Franklin sits in silence, pausing. "That is an interesting… speculation. But, of course, we will not be abandoning _Erebus_ , nor _Terror_ , should she suffer some minor misfortunes. We are almost there - "

" _Hear me,_ John. It won't matter if we're two-hundred or two- _thousand_ miles from safe water. If the leads close up and we are out there in it, we'll have no idea where the current will move the pack, of which we will be a part. We could be forced onto the shallows on the weather side of King William and crushed to atoms, if we're even upright by then." He pauses. "As a trusted friend once put it: this place wants us dead." 

"Who is this friend?” Fitzjames drawls. “Does he also write melodrama?" 

The twitch is too much. Francis slams his miserable fist down upon the sturdy oak of the table. A teacup upsets, spilling brown liquid over maps and papers, staining them as it creeps. Francis' sleeve is soaked and he knows the warm liquid will turn frozen soon, chilling his damnable skin. But he has Fitzjames' wide-eyed and dark attention, he has the man's blessed silence. In the wake of a ruined tea, he leans in to speak. "Sir John, myself, Mr. Blanky and Mr. Reid," Francis says, his words measured and furious. "Only four of us at this table are Arctic veterans. There'll be no melodramas here. Just live men. Or dead men."

* * *

Why did he come? 

It's always the same answer. For love. _Terror_ 's masts reach for the sky as their rowboat makes its return. His love, his first command. _Terror_ waits with open arms, ready to pull him close to her and lie down beside him. He knows her secrets, her innermost thoughts as well as she does his. His love, who had first greeted the world in 1813, had been twenty-six by the time Francis had met her and run his calloused hands over her reinforced walls of sturdy oak. She wears a new dress for this expedition, iron plating has been added fore and aft on the hull. Cross-planking has been added to the decks and a locomotive steam engine and screw propeller fitted too.

In the shape of her, he can read her biography. Her heavy build, meant for war. When he walks the decks, he knows each spot where the ten original cannons had once been placed. He can count the exact steps needed from stem to stern, port to starboard. She had fired these guns during the War of 1812, sending off the rockets' red glare. He knows the story of how she had staggered across the Atlantic in the hands of Sir George Back, bleeding from an iceberg tear and sinking slowly before miraculously beaching on an Irish shore. The remaining chapters of _Terror_ are not stories he has heard but the ones he tells himself. Two sister ships closely weaving through southern ice, nearly crashing together. Plotting the shape of the Antarctic continent. Sailing and resting in Van Diemen's Land. Francis knows the feel of her ten-spoke wheel in his hands better than he knows the skin of any lover he's ever had.

Why did he come? _Terror_ is the only love who has never turned him away.

How could he have left her?


	2. Chapter 2

You want to know about James. Alright. Sit down. This will take some time. 

* * *

_Villanova de Melfontes, Portugal  
_ _March 1828_

  
  


"She's a wreck."

"Aye, that she is."

James frowns, walking around the ruined ship dragged up upon the sand and wood-breaking rocks. "Can she be restored?"

His captain looks over, a considering look in his eye. "Lad, anything can be fixed if you put the work into it." His gnarled hands run over the ship's battered hull. Look at this pile of wood and iron, wounded and bleeding out on the Portuguese coast. He can tell even now, a beached ruin, that the HMS _Terror_ would not be a beauty even when seaworthy. But would she sail again?

Someone thinks so. So James leans in, putting his back into it. The Portuguese sun browns him, the white sand beating it back upward. The water is clear here and the dunes are golden and sloping. James is fifteen and full of wildness; after a day of working on _Terror_ , he runs along the dunes, feeling the sand give way beneath his feet. He laughs until he cannot breathe. He naps under the lazy shade of cork oak trees, hearing the wind ruffle the leaves. When he wanders the cobblestoned streets and leans against the whitewashed walls, Portuguese flows through in whispers and snatches of conversation. 

He pretends that he cannot understand it. (As if he had never been sung a lullaby in Portuguese; as if the heart forgets the rhythm of its first tongue.) 

He is watching the water. 

How many waves? They had been shipwrecking waves before. Now, as he watches, they are steady and even, their crests small. Detritus from the storm litters the shore. Rocks and shells, eelgrass and driftwood. Flotsam, yes, and jetsam too. He walks over the sand. The berm crumbles under his weight. The waves come and go. Some larger, some smaller, over and over and over again since the dawn of time. James counts them in sets of nine, for the ninth, as the stories go, should always be the biggest. According to the stories, it should be world-ending. Someone had told him that once, back in another time and another world. 

"Look at her," a midshipman with pale eyes says, knocking his elbow into James' skinny ribs. James’ dark hair scrapes his shoulders and he notices the way the other boy’s skin pinks in the sun. His blood races and his heart sinks and he keeps his damn mouth shut.

“Well, I must hand it to you," James says, "I didn't think she'd make it." 

_Well done, Terror. Perhaps we'll meet again._

* * *

_HMS Erebus_ _  
__September 1846_

Look out there, what do you see?

Ice. Ice everywhere. 

It is white as far as James can see. The ships are locked in, gripped by the clawing hands of the pack. There is no maneuver to get out, no blast to set. He cannot turn a wheel nor drop an anchor. There is, suddenly, the worst stillness. 

His heart races and jaw clenches. Expectation is one thing, reality another. _Terror_ sits a half-mile ahead, going nowhere fast. 

"An adventure for Queen and country," Sir John says, turning back with a resolute smile. But there had been a flicker of unease, hadn't there? James does not miss it, the passing of doubt. A sick feeling grows in his belly, hearing angry words in a low, controlled voice. _This place wants us dead,_ Francis had said. _We may not have weeks,_ Francis had said. He had been right; they had not had weeks. 

_What else are you right about?_ He doesn't know. Instead, he looks at the compass, watching the needle spin wildly out of control. 

* * *

There was a time in London, watching the ships sail in and out of the Thames, when every girl (and some of the men) was in love with Sir James Clark Ross. James Fitzjames, newly appointed commander in the Royal Navy, had caught glimpses of the man here and there, and had sailed the _Clio_ back to England with an intense curiosity in his throat about the returned expedition. He had wanted to travel and see the north. His winds had blown him every which way _but_ north. How many letters had he sent to Sir John Barrow, begging a position on the proposed search for the Passage? For a walking party of twenty-two men to the Pole? The _Clio_ had docked in early October 1844 and James had found his way to a room and a pub, knocking lager back with faces he had not seen for years. 

"That's him," a fellow said, knocking James in the ribs. He had pointed to a corner table, where a small group of officers was seated. It was a quiet table. One man, long and lean, cut an attractive figure in his navy jacket, the gilded trim setting off loose auburn hair. It was the other man who held his attention; James could not quite understand why. He was broad-faced and stockier. Wide-shouldered and pale-haired, scribbled in with grey at the temples. His skin was ruddied at the nose and cheeks in that wind-roughened way of all seasoned sailors. Deep lines marked his eyes, his mouth, the small bit of neck above his clothing. He was perhaps fifty or fifty-five, James reckoned. Though he of all people knew that the sea can age a man quickly; this one might easily be younger than that. What was it that had drawn his attention? By all measures, his companion was the fairer of the two. But there was a quiet solemnity in the way the man cupped his wide hands around his glass, a strange melancholy in the set of his jaw. James found himself fascinated.

"Pardon?" James asked with a dry throat. "Who is he?"

His friend nodded to the redhaired fellow. "Sir James Clark Ross. Returned last year."

James nodded. "And the other chap?"

"Oh, that's Captain Francis Crozier. He was in the south with Ross, had command of the - "

" _Terror_ ," James had murmured. "Yes, I know."

Yes, he knew everything there was to know about the expedition. He had inhaled the pamphlets and articles as they were released, had lived on a diet of steady Admiralty gossip. Antarctica. It sounded like a dream. Somewhere wide and strange and new. There would be adventure there. James would close his eyes, standing on the deck of his own ship as it sailed the equator, imagining bracing wind and carving his way through ice storms. He had been an active child and his family had sent him to sea aged twelve, brought in aboard the HMS _Pyramus_ , hoping to let his excitable nature out a little. There had been no intent for a lifetime's naval career; yet, here he is, thirty-two years old and still sailing. Still craving something. 

Antarctica. 

He would love to walk over to that corner table and tap the two men upon the shoulder. To ask them if he might sit and share a pint, if they’d share their table and their tale too. Tell me about the end of the world. Tell me what you found there. He doesn’t know enough and aches to fill in the gaps. The details he does know are simple enough. Public knowledge. In 1839, two ships and their crews had set sail for the south, seeking that pole. The HMS _Erebus_ and HMS _Terror,_ both Vesuvius-class warships built to volley cannons rather than to break ice. But the sturdiness of their frames, meant to withstand those same bombs, had lent itself to Arctic exploration. Sir James Clark Ross, thirty-nine years old and magnetic, led as captain aboard _Erebus_ . His second-in-command, sailing _Terror_ alongside, was Francis Crozier. James knows what everyone knows. The expedition had lasted four years and been a brilliant success. The South Magnetic Pole could be reckoned with now. Pages upon pages were brought back with careful notes and studies of botany and zoology. Joseph Dalton Hooker, enthusiastic with a gun, had shot every creature he’d seen. Eaten some of them too. 

The ghost of the word _Antarctica_ was still on his lips when James had heard the Admiralty was thinking of the Northwest Passage again. It wasn’t a surprise; it never was. Britain returned to seek the passage over and over and over again, like a lonely lover looking for the one who had gotten away. 

_Send me,_ James had said. (Begged.) So they did. 

James had been with his captain, Sir John Franklin, when the Admiralty had passed down their orders. The simple directives belie the tangled knot of the matter. Many have sought the Passage, none have ever successfully completed it. Still, times have changed and it’s difficult with these modern ships and well-laid maps to imagine that this expedition might fail. The eastward part of the Passage is known, in from Lancaster Sound through the vein-like network of inlets to King William Land. The west, dipping inward from the Bering Strait, is also known and mapped. There is some small matter of approximately sixty-nine square miles left uncharted. 

They have come to chart them. 

The orders, when James glances over the paper on Franklin’s desk, are simple. Sir John Franklin will command _Erebus,_ taking along her sister ship _Terror_ under the command of Captain Francis Crozier. They are to proceed to first Davis Strait, then Baffin Bay, before completing the Passage and coming out on the west coast via the Bering Strait. Then, successful and chilly, to set sail for the Sandwich Isles, to be refitted and refreshed, while sending word of their success with a messenger via Panama. He himself is to be charged with that “important branch of science” of studying the magnetic poles of that strange place. 

So few directions for such a massive undertaking; he wonders where they will sail in between the lines. 

* * *

When James looks up, he finds he is always being watched. From the start, Captain Francis Crozier had seemed to keep a piercing eye on him. Those pale blue eyes, the color of skies from places long ago, seemingly pinning him like a dead butterfly to a board and sounding out his inadequacies. Under Francis’ watchful and critical look, James wonders which of his own failings are already known to the captain and which will work their way out, like earthworms from a rain-soaked soil. The way Francis watches him makes James uncertain. He turns to Sir John, trying to shake the weight of Francis' eyes off of himself. 

“There is nothing worse than a man who has lost his joy. He's become insufferable,” he says, trying to shake the lingering feeling off. “And he's a lushington to boot.” (James flares with silent fury thinking of how deftly a half-soused Francis can tie a knot, how he can walk across the decks without swaying. Even soaked in whiskey, Francis is a better sailor than he will ever be.)

“We should be better friends to him, James," Franklin counsels. 

“I can't work out why he's even here. He despises glory. Even the glory of a good pudding." He glances over to _Terror_ again, a constant dark touchstone on the horizon. It is the only interruption in the ice as far as the eye can see, so he finds himself searching it out every time. _Terror,_ his magnetic north, drawing his eye again. He breathes out heavily, glancing over to see that Franklin has sought the other ship as well. Somehow, that unsettles him. 

"And he looks down on we of the wardroom," James continues. "I tell you, one glance from him I have to remind myself I'm not a fraud.”

“I'll not have you speak of him uncharitably, James. He is my second. Now, if something were to happen to me, you would be his second. You should cherish that man.”

James imagines trying to act as second to Francis. How could a crew love a foul-tempered creature such as that? How could James, in all good conscious, bear it? In the wake of the loss of Sir John, fatherly and priestly, there would be a void. He grows cold to think of it. 

“Sometimes I think you love your men more than even God loves them, Sir John.” Sailors in the hands of an angry God. He frowns, watching _Terror_ (Francis) again, wondering if Francis is looking back. Sometimes he has the strangest urge to ask Francis what he’s afraid of. (Sometimes he has the strangest feeling that it might be himself.) 

He could ask to borrow the telescope from Franklin, just to be sure. He does not.

“For all your sakes," Franklin says, turning aside. "Let's hope you're wrong.”

* * *

James is writing.

His aunt had asked for him to keep a diary. He holds the porcupine quill between his fingers, glancing up at the portrait of his uncle and foster father, perched upon the bookshelf above his bunk. Nothing rocks nor pitches strangely. When James had first boarded the ship, she had seemed like a tub. Heavy and ungainly. But now, he knows better. The sea is smooth and _Erebus_ is solid and dense beneath him, surrounding him safely like the belly of a whale. He writes of this to his aunt, filling in the pages with what tales he can wring out, sketching in some small illustrations of the cast of characters and their frozen homes. Where his script is a bit of a fine scrawl, he has a careful hand for drawing. There, coaxed out of pen and ink, comes Sir John in his hat, standing at the wheel. His old friend, Lieutenant Le Vesconte is next, then the ship’s doctor, Stephen Stanley, who had plucked a bullet from his arm once. The Ice Master of _Terror_ , a dry-humored Yorkshireman called Thomas Blanky, has a fascinating face and James finds himself often trying to capture that sardonic expression. He likes to draw little Jacko too, the ship’s monkey (a gift from Lady Franklin). When he is tired and lost, sometimes he even draws himself, reminding himself that he's a part of this too. That he had come along and sailed, no ghost in the margins. 

There are no drawings of _Terror’s_ captain. 

James pauses. It will be an odd and obvious oversight to have nothing of Francis. He puts hesitant pen to paper; he’s studied the other man’s face enough, trying to make some sense of him, that it isn’t difficult to recall. The forward and worried slope of his forehead, the upward curve of his nose. The round face and cleft chin. Francis is a sturdy sort and age has loosened the skin at his neck and jaw. James draws a faithful rendition of the many lines and little scars that interrupt his skin, carefully rendering the shadows. There are shadows in the pale eyes too, though also light. He finishes with some small feathering on the swept part of Francis’ blond and close-cropped hair, realizing that he has studied Francis more than he had expected. Too much. 

He does not know why Francis watches him; he knows why he looks back.

He sighs.

(The first time, tell me about the first time you left.)

James had been twelve years old when the door to Rose Hill had shut behind him and Hertfordshire left in the distance. He had rambled in and out of the grassy fields, picking the heath and bell heather. Hertfordshire with its fine white hemlock and dogrose trees. "Be careful what you share, James," his uncle had said. "There are some that would judge you on your cover. You're not like other children; you'll need to tell the world what you want them to think."

James knows the weight of a story. He learns how to spin. He thinks of his two-part secret buried under his skin. Love of family and of the heart and neither a story to share; there is no one on earth that James has ever told the full tale to. He cannot imagine it. He leans back, rubbing the tiredness out from between his eyes, pulling his fingers through his hair. From where he sits writing, he can reach out and touch his bed. Even open a drawer, where they are set into the bedframe beneath the mattress. It's a cramped space, yes, but it is his own. Everything is built in or nailed down, shipbuilders know the world they work in is topsy-turvy. Everything on an angle, clinging to the edge. You get used to being tossed about. Learn to stand with your feet apart, bracing for the sea change. Learn to hold on to anything nailed down. Keep a lid on, keep your door closed, just in case. He likes to imagine he was born to the sea. Like Aphrodite, just flotsam for a mother and jetsam for a father. He has no mother, no father. Barely a name. 

Those who have stayed firmly in the boundaries of their definitions learn to see the world as black and white. Each label, clear cut with four corners, like a box to settle down in. The marginal understand that boundaries are permeable at best; that the borders we make for ourselves are as invisible as the lines we draw between countries. All made up. Invented. He is asked _where are you from?_ How do you answer this? A man who might have been born and raised from birth in one town would not hesitate. But James was born under a blue sky and in the shadow of mountains he does not remember. Can he be from somewhere he does not remember? He has nothing to tie him to Brazil but his blood. There's a strange weight when he thinks of Rio and the Sugarloaf Mountains. How can you be nostalgic for somewhere you don't recall?

James sighs, brushing out imaginary wrinkles from his sleeve. Some people grow from the dirt up, keeping their roots in the soil; his first memory is on the water, faint and distant. Someone hummed a lullaby and he had been held close, feeling the vibrations from their chest. The ship had rocked and pitched. His first memory is at an angle; the rest of the world has never made sense. 

Why is he here? Where is he going and what does he wish? Even James isn’t certain of the answers. He is not, unfortunately, entirely sure what he is looking for. He has sailed back and forth through a myriad of ports; the world is too well-mapped. Too picked over. He will not find it here. 

* * *

Days (and nights) aboard a ship are not all toil and trouble. In the evenings, James looks for ways to amuse his crew. The officers take their meals in the wardroom and the crew in the open area before the mainmast. As the night grows, shortly after the tables are cleared, there’s still the faint taste of a pudding in his mouth and the heavy hops flavor of Allsopp’s Arctic ale. Music flows from an accordion and laughter rings out from near the galley. James finds himself in a game of chess with his purser, glancing up to watch Francis dress in his slops, preparing for the long walk back to _Terror._

_Why are you here? Why did you come if just to hate us? You don't believe in this, in us, you never have. Don't you dare lie to me and tell me you wanted this. Why did you come? (You gave so much to another voyage once, you were a legend. I heard the stories. The tales. Captain Crozier and the ice storm, weaving between the ruins like Odysseus finding his way home. Beowulf keeping out of Grendel's needy hands. They said you laughed then, danced a quadrille on ice. Why can't you be a part of this too? With us? Why did you come?)_

His teeth dig into his lower lip. In between Francis pulling on his coat and his hat, James loses his queen. "You win again, old man," James laughs. 

"Another?" The purser asks, grinning. He looks over to where Francis has disappeared up the stairs. "Don't envy that walk tonight. It's cold enough to make your teeth freeze."

James blinks. "Wait, how do _teeth_ freeze?”

“They’re porous, eh? I guess the water or your spit or whatever can get in there. Old John Ross is happy enough to tell you about it. Something to keep in mind when it's cold enough. They'll freeze instantly and shatter.” 

James pauses, mouth parted and brow raised. That’s a new one to him, the freezing of bone. A horrible curiosity settles deep between his ribs. Wondering suddenly about his own death, perched there at the distal end of his own time. _How will I die?_ It is the question all of us try not to ask, that sits there constantly behind our eyes like a bad headache. James collects the ways now, stories of how the ice might break a man, wondering which one is his own. He had thought he had known once, in that split instant when the bullet had struck through his side. _Death by gunfire,_ he had thought, his curiosity and fear sated at last. It is not so bad once you know. (It had been stolen from him, the oasis of knowing. Plucked from death and tossed back again into the mess of the living. _Go fish._ Try again for another death, maybe the next one will be worse. Maybe next time his bones will freeze, the water filling into the porosity of the calcium. Water expands when frozen but bone is solid, it does not bend. To stretch bone is to shatter it. Perhaps, next time, he will shatter.)

He runs his tongue along his lower teeth, reassuring himself that they're all there and accounted for. Incisors and molars too. 

The chessboard waits. Go on, play the game again. 

Maybe this time you'll win.

* * *

“He is too cautious.”

“He knows these ships and this ice.”

"Forgive me, Sir John, but the man is a swizzler. He may know the land, this - ice, even. But his judgment in such a state cannot be sound. Even I can see how his hands shake - "

"Not from drink," Franklin says mildly, shaking his head. 

James raises a brow. "Pardon?"

"He visited us down there, you know. And I do recall Sir James telling Jane about a night they had had with a storm. It had tossed both ships together, this and _Terror_ , and nearly smashed the damn things to bits. Sir James said he hadn’t the faintest how they’d both made it out of that storm unscathed but that their hands still both shook after.” He pauses. “And I gather that they still do.”

James shakes his head. “These stories I’ve heard - he seems a different man.” So many stories. None of them square up with the miserable devil before him. James nearly feels lied to. 

"I just don't understand why he resists us, James."

"He's a disappointed man. You should not have to bear his grievances." James frowns. A memory flickers, one he has tried to forget. Francis had been aboard _Erebus,_ dining in the Great Cabin, and James had found himself performing once again, in the manner he always seemed to fall into when Francis was watching. He talks longer, talks louder, embroiders the edges of his stories more. _Tell us about Birdshit Island,_ Francis had said, interrupting James. _That's a capital story._

James had felt sick then and does now. He remembers the hot flush of anger down his chest, the humiliation sticky in his spine. Francis has always known how to say just the right thing to cut him down at the knees; to point out just, exactly, how _nothing_ he is. It feels like being scolded. He knows who he is already; what he is and what he is not. It tastes like vinegar mixed with ash. Not all monsters are hideous. He tries to put his finger on the meat of it. James Fitzjames of Nowhere and Nothing. How can you be defined by what you are not?

"Perhaps it is I who's unable to truly bring him into the bosom of my confidence," Franklin murmurs. "I want to. I always plan to. But then, when I'm with him, I don't know why I falter."

James grits his teeth. "You have done everything for the man."

"Have I?"

"Sir, he was no-one's first choice for this expedition."

"Mm, nor was I," Franklin muses. 

_No, but you opened yourself to it instead of griping dismally every chance you get._ From the window, there is a clear view of the horizon. A sundog gleams, ice crystals bending the light, bouncing off the desert of snow and ice before him. Even here, icebound, he feels more himself than on land. He never feels quite right except when water is near. He shakes his head. "How any man achieves his post on an expedition is less important than how he spends it. And… well, that he measures up. I will not have Francis' melancholy touch you. I'll not have it. Do you hear me?"

When he glances up again, his reflection looking back in the window with dark hair curling at his sides and lines wrinkling his forehead, he is not certain if he is speaking to Sir John or to himself.

* * *

The ocean again.

The sea is easy; no one asks him difficult questions here. There’s relief in the uniform he pulls on each morning, in the strict detailing of his duties. He tells stories here, all recollections of madcap adventures and other voyages. Mostly, he listens to the sound of the small town that the ship has become. Sixty men, all of them with a reason for seeking the edges of the earth. Everyone knows they have their own complicated answers, so no one asks complicated questions. All that matters, once you have set sail, is whether or not you can get the job done.

James spends as little time on land as he might. The _Clio_ had docked in England in October 1844 and James had already been writing to Sir John Barrow, anxious to get his next appointment and cast himself off again. It had only been nine months between sailing in with the _Clio_ and out upon _Erebus_ ; honestly, he would not have minded if it were shorter. 

His existence is a careful one. What mother does he have? What father? Nothing. Nothing but a name scribbled in. _James Fitzjames._ It sounds like a placeholder even to him. 

What mother? He likes to imagine she was beautiful. He would try to find her in his own face. After a bath, scrubbed well with fine-milled soaps smelling of lemon verbena and lavender, he would wrap himself in a towel and stand before the mirror. _She must be in here_. He had squinted his dark eyes (that might be hers) and considered his sharp nose (that might be hers). His hands had prodded at his face, as careful as an archaeologist, trying to find a history written there. The silence has always been maddening. There are no answers here, only flesh and bone.

The first time James boards a ship he is two years old. He does not remember it, does not remember crying in his guardian’s arms while the ship rocked nor the wild storms of their crossing. He did not know then, as they sailed across the Atlantic from Brazil to England, that he would never see the sky of his birth again. Some of us do not get to keep the places we were given to. What does James have when he goes to sea at thirteen? He has no name, no mother. No father to claim him, no address to call his own someday. What does he take with him to the sea? Only what he can carry. 

It is a strange thing to not remember one’s own birthplace. Most of us live and die in the same spot. Some move on, move out, move up. Our culture thrives on our personal histories. How we celebrate holidays, whether or not you call on your mother on Sundays. James has never known. All he has is the name of a city he doesn't remember and several stabs in the dark.

The polished surface conceals other failures. One of them, the worst of them all, is unspeakable. 

“Someday, James,” his aunt had said, pulling a blanket up over him. “You’ll find a lovely girl and get married. Have a house just like this. Make every dream of yours come true.”

A dream of a comfortable life. A warm home and a garden of hyacinth and rosemary. A dog at his feet and a fire in the hearth. Someone to come home to. He might have made captain by then, carved out something for himself. No one would look closer, picking apart his patchwork background. It would all be safe and in hand and no one would know the truth about him. No one would take it away. 

He had been ten then. Eleven, maybe. That was a long time ago. It had been a blissful three years of a nursed dream before the truth of himself fractured just a little bit further. There, as the ship’s boys traded stories of the girls they’d like to kiss and the imagined shapes of their bodies beneath crinoline and silk, James had once more realized the edges of himself did not quite line up with what was expected. He dreamt of touch and kiss, same as anyone, but the shapes of his wants looked like himself. That unspeakable thing. Inversion. Expressly forbidden by the Articles, forbidden by society. James had flushed red and angry and made up outlandish stories of girls that had never existed and never would. In his hammock, half-alone while the others slept, he had folded into himself and swore that he’d never get caught. He’d build a great gilded life and live the way he chose, desires be damned. 

He had scrubbed himself of his illegitimacy; he could erase this part of himself too. 

  
  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

Once upon a time, an old man turned tail and fled from Nineveh. 

(That's reasonable enough, we're all cowards. The trouble was that his pursuer was the Lord.)

So Jonah ran to the sea, begging to board a ship toward Tarshish. There were sunspots on his skin and spittle in his beard, yet they took him on anyway. (At three times the price.) When a storm rocked the boat and Jonah pitched overboard, a whale surrounded him, swallowing him up in that dark cavern of a belly. In the water, protected by flesh and bone, Jonah floated for three days and three nights. 

But no one can live forever half-eaten; you cannot build a home between two ribs.

(Did it really happen that way? Is it true? After all this time, well, I suppose it’s true enough now.)

* * *

_May 1847  
HMS Terror_

Some considerations on ice.

Ice: the frozen state of water, reaching a solid state at zero degrees centigrade. White and wide, ice is by nature immovable. Pack ice behaves differently. These ice floes form near the poles of the earth, creating sheets miles wide. They have nothing to attach to, no harness to reel them in, so they float upon the open water, shifting this way and that. _Terror_ and _Erebus_ are frozen in, iced into the middle of the pack, like nacre around their two bits of sand. But ice doesn’t make a pearl; it builds coffins instead.

Ice is a keeper, a preserver. In ice, frozen to temperatures below those suitable for decomposition and kept safe from eroding wind and rain, we might linger on well past our time. Think of the Copper Age Iceman picked out of the Alps, his skin preserved so well that we can still find the arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder. We can look at his face and give him a name. From there, we might name his murderer too. 

Ice doesn’t negotiate.

(A waypoint: it is May 1847. It has been a year and a half since the first deaths had occurred upon these ships. Their graves dug into the unforgiving dirt, their headstones carved with somber hands. In kinder latitudes, the earth would have begun to reclaim their bodies and pine boxes too, pulling back into her. But here the ice holds court. Even dead and gone, no one gets to leave.)

Make a white world of it. Write a dictionary of frozen things. Pack ice. The spinning plates of frazil ice. Wet slush and spongey shuga. The oil slick look of grease ice, made of loosely netted frazil crystals floating upon the surface. Watch rafted ice shear up and over another frozen floe. Know how to tally it up and guess at an age, like looking at the height of a child or the rings of a tree. Twenty-five names for ice, none of them right. There have been ages when the Earth was cooler. Glaciers roamed the fields, carving out lakes and mountains. Some cling to high elevations, melting in the spring little by little. The last ice age may have ended but here, with nothing but white sky and white snow to keep him company, it’s hard to fathom that this ice might ever end. That there may be a place on Earth where the air is warm. 

The crossing had been rough. Some storms bring fear, no matter how seasoned of a sailor you are. Every seaman's teeth are cut on tales of sunken ships; none of them know how to swim. Francis sets a grim mouth and thinks of the tossing in the Antarctic, _Terror_ and _Erebus_ driven together, hull against hull. He had wondered then if they should all find their end.

“Commander Fitzjames is here, sir,” Jopson says, ducking his head into the Great Cabin. Francis’ eyes don’t look up from his map, stuck somewhere between Baffin Bay and Somerset Island. Exhaustion makes his head feel heavy. That ever-present headache still fiddles about his spine.

“Bully for him,” Francis mutters. He swallows a sigh. “Show him in then.”

The tea follows shortly after Fitzjames enters the room. He’s removed his cap, though pale snow still speckles his curls. He takes the chair opposite Francis without sparing a question, crossing one long leg one over another. 

“Good morning, Francis.”

 _Is it?_ “Are we to be without Sir John today?”

Fitzjames nods, drinking from a china teacup painted with a delicate willow pattern. “I’m afraid to report that Sir John is feeling rather unwell. Though, we can manage well enough. I’ve brought Mr. Reid, he should be walking the ice with Mr. Blanky now. Les Vesconte and Lieutenant Little are reviewing _Terror’_ s stores now as well. I’m rather afraid that for this part of the meeting, it will be just the two of us.”

“I assure you, James, I shall endeavor to contain my excitement.”

A line twitches on Fitzjames’ forehead. In a moment, it disappears, his expression placid and amiable once again. 

“Well then, go on,” Francis says. “Give your report, man.”

Fitzjames smooths his jacket and glances up again, hesitating only for a brief instant before launching into an overall state of affairs in _Erebus._ He tells how morale is high and all is well. Sir John had suffered a bout of dyspepsia, though Dr. Stanley had assured that it was nothing to be deeply concerned about. A little rest and fluids and he would be up on deck again, as shipshape as the lot.

“The last of it all - “

“The ice,” Francis mutters. “The only thing that matters.”

“Mr. Reid and Mr. Blanky will have the full report, of course, but the gist of it is, well, as you know.“

“There is no thaw.”

Fitzjames looks grim. Francis finds himself carefully watching how the lines tighten on the commander’s face. They are far fewer than his own, but they cross his forehead and pitch tents below his eyes. Deep creases mark his long cheeks. He looks tired. _If Sir John were here, you’d wear a different face, would you not? Something braver? A simpering lie, perhaps?_

“No,” Fitzjames says at last. “Nothing at all.” His hand curls into a half-fist where it rests on his thigh. “Of course, we must consider that it is only May, the summer could - “

“It won’t. Tis already a colder year by far.”

“Do you suppose we’re to be here - all summer?”

“All summer. And autumn and winter and another spring too. And _that’s_ supposing that a thaw comes in the following.”

“We are provisioned for three years, Francis.” There is a question concealed in the statement. 

“Aye - and it was to be up to five, save for the rotted muck we picked out of our teeth last autumn. Three years. If we find no thaw come next spring…” Francis pauses. “We should have made haste for the eastern shore last autumn. If the leads do not open up come spring, we’ll have run out of favors from God.”

“It cannot be so dire as all that.”

“Can it not?”

Fitzjames’ chest falls as he sighs. The tea between them, elegant hands stirring the brown liquid with a silver spoon. Pale and finely-haired across the knuckles, the nails impeccably trimmed, Francis wishes to find fault. Assign duty owing. But there is nothing save for the rough calluses on the sides of his fingers, at the heel of his palm. They sit in silence. Light filters in through the long windows of _Terror_ ’s Great Cabin. Three years. They had left Greenhithe in the spring of 1845. Now, in the dead of a cold May in 1847, those three years no longer seem impossible. 

“No one knows where we are, James. That is the barest of facts,” Francis murmurs. “The Hudson Bay Company has set up on Great Slave Lake. If we send a sledge party now, they would have time enough to make the distance before winter.”

“That is a _suicide_ mission.”

“And this is not?”

“Sir John has faith that the leads will open. We cannot very well send a party out when we may by all rights be into the western charts by then!”

“Let Sir John reward you then for your loyalty, this land will not.”

Fitzjames shakes his head. “You are all doom, Francis. I can feel it from the moment I come aboard this ship, you poison the well with your morbing about. Our duty is to keep focused on the Passage and to keep cheer in our men’s hearts and you consider neither of these.”

“My _duty_ ,” Francis hisses, “Is to get the men of this expedition out _alive_ whether it be to the west side or the east. And no dangled promise of a gilded Admiralty medal or half-cracked command will turn my eye to forget.” He leans back in his chair, exhausted. The headache knocks harder against the inside of his skull. “Abandon the Passage for lost, James. It is not ours to claim. We must seek rescue.”

“Francis - “ Fitzjames says, looking up. He opens his mouth, then closes it, as if thinking better of what he might say. 

_Doesn’t matter._

The whiskey is on the sideboard. Francis eyes the cut-crystal decanter. 

“Will you drink?”

“For God’s sake, it’s ten-thirty in the morning.”

“Better to drink it now,” Francis mutters darkly, “than to carry it later.”

He doesn’t need to look over to know those dark eyes are upon him. He doesn’t need to look over to see the clean, polished lines of James Fitzjames. The elegant way he seats himself in a chair, the way thin hands smooth imaginary wrinkles from his well-brushed coat. He does not need to see how the light shines from his black hair, nor how it catches upon his face. His odd, long face that should not, by any measure, be beautiful. Reduce it down to parts. Consider the sharp nose and the strong jaw, the deep lines and heavily-hooded eyes. The olive hint of his complexion, the irony in his smile. Somehow, added together, something infuriating and beautiful is the sum. Francis cannot work it out.

“Do you suppose we will walk?”

Francis turns, not looking at the commander but instead toward the windows, out into the vast expanse of white ice. A pale and endless nothing. One foot in front of another. He has looked at the maps, counting out each mile with a protractor. There are eight-hundred miles to the nearest known European settlement. Eight-hundred miles for the skin of your heels to split, the weight of the sledge ropes to cut into your shoulders and back, separating muscle from bone as deftly as a butcher. Even in the summer, the cold here can be flaying and brutal. Frostbite will nip at their noses, yes, and fingers and toes too. Choked by cold, they will blacken and rot. And fall off, if they’re lucky. The surgeon’s iron tourniquet will clamp their blood if they’re not, the saw doing the rest of the work. Eight-hundred miles. It is impossible to imagine. If it comes to walking, Francis does not know how they will make it though. Some will fall. The snow will bury them. Winter will pull a blanket over their bleached bones. 

_No one is coming for us. No one knows where we are. We must send a party now, as quickly as we can, or these ships will be nothing more than fine coffins._

“Ask the ice in a year’s time, James. Better yet, pray for a thaw.”

"Yes, well. It's to us to keep our chins up then." His expression darkens then smooths, deciding upon a tack. "The leads will open."

 _You sound like Sir John. Stop. What are you really thinking?_ Francis frowns. "Don't sell me a damned dog. That's the tail end of it then?"

Fitzjames' thin mouth quirks slightly. "Not _entirely._ Sir John thinks, and I concur, that it would be good to try to lift the men's spirits and give them something to focus on. Something brighter than the long winter and the - " He hesitates, dark eyes flickering to the windows' white world and beyond. "The question of a summer remaining ensconced in the ice. He's proposed something of a merry benjo."

"Has he now?"

"Rumors of your quadrille in the south have run far and wide, I'm afraid Sir James Ross told that tale one or twenty times over sherry. It's become quite a favorite of Sir John's." He looks to Francis, catching that pale uneasy gaze. Francis watches how he holds his cap in his lap, long fingers running idly over the brim. A sly smile dawns on the commander. "I mean to say, Captain Crozier and his Lady Ross - it does rather make an impression."

Francis flushes. Look at him, blotchy and humiliated, though he cannot quite put a finger on why. He stands, roughly pushing back the chair. The bottle, the bottle again. He turns toward the sideboard as if he had intended this from the start, looking away. Two fingers. Easy enough. He stands silently, holding the tumbler in his hands. A scrape of a chair comes from behind him. He doesn't look. He can hear only the hesitation of leather boots. The clearing of a throat. "I meant no disrespect, Francis - "

"You are required on _Erebus,_ I believe,” Francis says at length, chipping his words from the ice. 

The cabin seems louder after Fitzjames takes his leave; second thoughts make for terrible company.

* * *

His fists clench. Cut there, into the skin, with ragged fingernails. Perhaps he will bleed later. To hate James Fitzjames, Commander of the HMS _Erebus_ , hero of the Opium Wars, is to be an outcast. To hate James is tantamount to a sin. Francis is good at mortal sins. He collects them like trophies.

Pride. He knows there is nothing, really, to be proud of in his miserable existence. He is ugly, he knows. No one need tell him. His skin is textured and ruddy, his nose too crooked. 

There is wrath. Wrath, of course, is his favorite. He is powerful in his own anger, strident and lit up in scarlet and crimson. He is good at anger, it is his favorite emotion, the only one that burns him from the inside out, razes him like a forest fire, leaves him fresh and clean and pure.

He keeps lust to himself, though he is sick with it. It chokes him from the inside out, like pneumonia fills up a man’s lungs with fluid, drowns a man in the wide-open air. The sick, revolting want drips from him no matter how many baths he takes, no matter how he scrubs at his skin. There is no cure for it. He would take a knife and cut it from his very flesh if he could, pick it off like a scab. The inversion lingers beneath his own skin and Francis knows there is no cure. Ice. Put it on ice. Ice it down, ice it out. Ice is a question of movement. You cannot sail on ice, so go on, put one leg in front of the other. Make it over to me. Be careful how you step, ice will choose how you get here. Throw the salt of yourself down, melt the world. Don’t spin out of control. Keep yourself on it. Keep your unnatural want on ice, frozen and away. Sink it deep, down in the dark water below the surface, where nothing moves but monsters. 

_James._

What an impossible name. What impossible men. Francis feels sick at the syllables of it. The simple sounds of his own destruction, spelled out in five easy letters. He’s put the memory of James Clark Ross away in a drawer of his mind, locked and sealed and promised against. But whiskey, as always, is a key. When Francis pulls out the memory of his friend, Ross is always fainter and paler than before. His features are less distinct, the exact timbre of his voice blurred into a generic tone. Francis cannot remember where all the freckles on his face belong, where they should go on the back of his hand. He cannot remember the exact netting of lines on the other man’s face. It has been two years now, there would be new ones. Ones that Francis has never seen. 

The drawer for _James_ is not empty. The other image comes, sharper and cleaner. Renewed day after day. Commander James fucking Fitzjames is bright in his mind and sets Francis’ teeth on edge. His fingers tighten against the glass and he curls his lip at the thought of the other man. 

He cannot remember Ross exact but the details of Fitzjames barge in without asking. The square jaw, the dark eyes. The way his navy coat catches the wind, the look of his lean figure crossing the primary deck. The contemptuous and idle curl of his useless mouth and humor in his mocking stare. His black curls. Always set perfectly against that impossible (beautiful) face. Francis cannot bear the glance of him. One look from Fitzjames and he feels stripped clean of everything, reduced once more to the truth of himself. Old and lined, bitter and ugly. Irish and awkward. 

It is infuriating how Francis wants him. 

There again, as always, he finds himself hot below his collar and hard in his trousers. God, how Fitzjames would laugh if he knew the truth. The old wreck of a drunk with his pants around his knees and wrapping a tired fist around his cock to the thought of long fingers and lean thighs. He begins as he always does, a practiced fantasy of pushing the other man to his knees, watching those long lashes flicker against his skin while he takes Francis in his mouth. His hand moves quicker and the fantasies always spiral out of his control, moving somewhere deeper and stranger. Picture instead, Fitzjames and that imperious brow, that absurd mouth lifted in pride. He would wear that dark and well-kept coat while circling Francis, two hands kept behind his back and Francis at attention. Fitzjames would pause behind him, draw near enough to cast hot breath on the bare nape of Francis’ neck. _You’re beautiful, aren’t you?_ Fitzjames would say. _Good enough to be kept. Shall I keep you?_ When Fitzjames would pull him down to kneel before him, Francis would go without question, held in wanting hands. 

(When he is very, very drunk, he pictures that Fitzjames might stay after. For once in this godforsaken icescape, that Francis might be warm.)

He lays in his bunk, listening to the winds batter at the hull of the ship. A storm has come. The air whips through the decks. The wood is screaming, aching. This is a widowing night - women would stand out on porches with shawls tucked around them watching their husbands pulled down by Scylla and Charybdis into the depths. Francis crosses his arms over his chest like a Pharaoh in a sarcophagus, thinking of dead, mummified men. Each wrapped up like a gift, like a candy bar, and locked away within their boxes. Their riches long since plundered. Some opportunists steal the bones like talismans, as the medieval men did to saints, bringing them back to Britain to be pulverized into dust. Dust believed to invigorate, to brighten the body, push the blood through too-tight veins. _Graverobbing_ , Francis calls it. But, as always, if you've been dead long enough, it's never a grave but an archaeological site. He rolls over, brushing the death from his body. Under the wool blankets, he falls asleep to the sound of wind.

* * *

Once, when Francis was young, a midshipman aboard the _Hecla,_ Captain Parry had sent him ashore to take measurements. After four days and four nights and no sign of dove nor raven, a search party had gone to look for him, carrying sailcloth in their sacks to bear the body back. They’d found him quietly sitting on a rock, facing the waves, taking down his records in a log open upon his knees. Black ink, careful script, casual spelling. 

He’d blinked at seeing them. 

“My God, Francis,” Parry had cried out, his breast as puffed as a duck. “Where the bleeding Christ have you been?” 

Francis turned bemused eyes on them, glancing around at the ice to the east and the west, north and south. 

“I’ve been right here all along, sir,” he said. “Just as you sent me.” 

Later, when Barrow asks Francis what his best trait is, he will say _following orders._ Sitting across the table from Franklin on _Erebus_ , his stiff-collar scratching at his throat and whiskey coating his insides, Francis will wonder if it's not his worst trait instead.

Salt beef today and a steamed pudding stuffed with rum and dried figs. Even Tarrare would be sick of it by now, this same thing day in and day out. Though it is late, light beams down through the Preston Patent Illuminators. In summer, the sun is relentless. It's almost worse in summer, when the light shines on endlessly, glittering off the same uninterrupted ice as far as he can see. The one thing we count on, through the long day, is that night will finally come. We can pull the blankets over our heads, grab a little shut-eye. 

But right now, the sun hardly sets. In a few weeks, it will not set at all. It's impossible to not feel at the end of all things here, where the rules of earthly engagement no longer apply. 

Franklin drones on, Fitzjames pulls a laugh from the table. Francis drinks.

He's maudlin again. It's not the first time. Perhaps it had never truly settled. When the melancholy had first come on, setting in just after returning from the south with Ross, the Admiralty had patted him on the head and sent him on a tour. There had been mild days. He remembers some of them even half-fondly. There had been a lovely town in Brittany that he calls to mind. He had walked a good deal of the city once arriving, weaving down curved streets paved in grey cobblestones. Past the Breton market, smelling of the ocean, loaded down with langoustines and sea urchins, scallops and crabs. Francis is a keen man, his interest had piqued at the farmstands, laden with their inland offerings of cauliflower, peas, and cabbages. The artichokes were remarkably plump, ever so pleased with themselves. There was a hot smell of freshly butchered meat, lamb steaks and pork chops. Garlic sausages had hung from hooks. Fresh milk stored in glass bottles. There had been the famous Argoat apples and, next to the fruit, the Calvados distilled from them.

Nothing like salt beef and hardtack. 

"Francis," Franklin says, looking up over his plate. "Have you given any thought to the festivities? I've been thinking a great deal of your southern quadrille.”

Below the table, his fist rests on his knee, white at the knuckles. “I fear I have not yet the luxury.”

“The trouble with these dances is always encouraging someone to be the first. You opened that with Sir James there, that seemed to work marvelously.”

“Indeed,” Francis agrees slowly, uneasy to the bone. 

“Well, we should have a pair to open our little fête. Never do something halfway, as Jane says, that is if it’s worth doing at all. James here has mentioned that there are a few trunks with costume and dress in our lower decks. Why don’t the two of you work together and be the first out?”

Francis looks at Franklin in horror. In his periphery, he can see the sudden stilling of Fitzjames’ own cutlery. “Sir John, I do not think it wise - “

“Nonsense,” Franklin says, a damnable beatific smile on his face. “Consider! It would be a capital show of cooperation between our two ships from their commanding officers. Just the thing to boost everyone’s spirits.”

Francis bites the inside of his lower lip hard, staring furiously at the table. He wants a drink. A bottle of whiskey. An entire fish-kettle of whiskey.

“Of course,” he mutters, following orders again. 

* * *

At sea, a sailor is never still. In the ice, there is little to do. Their position is fixed and hands tied. They invent bathing schedules for the crew and inspect the polish of their boots. They holystone the decks twice a day for want of something to do. At night, they sprawl over their trunks, playing cards and dice. 

"The leads will open in the spring, Francis," Franklin says each day, humming a tune. Francis grits his teeth and counts the sundogs. Far too many, still far too cold. It should be warmer than this by now, here at the end of spring with summer already taking off its coat and setting its boots by the door, looking to stay awhile. Sunset is late and sunrise comes early. It is one bell, just half-past midnight on land, and the sun has just set. Francis watches the borealis paint the night, wondering when was the last time he had seen a true and proper green.

Footsteps fall behind him, steady and even. He doesn't need to look to know whose they are, not after so many decades.

"You weren't sleeping either?" 

Tom Blanky moves up close to him, looking just as tired as he feels. He's got a way about him that looks as if he should be missing an eye or a piece of his nose, though he's hale and hearty. A manner of incompleteness. They lean against the balustrade, _Terror_ 's English oak firm in his hands, reaching for her like a talisman.

"If only sleep were as simple as closing your eyes,” Tom chuckles. He nods. 

"I was thinking about Tad," Francis murmurs, allowing himself some small laughter. "The first of Parry's boat-hauling reindeer."

"Tad! What made you think of that poor sod?"

What had brought the reindeer to mind? It had been the worst sort of Exodus; we all imagine we make it out of the Red Sea, come out the other side, a little damp and wringing out our socks. Some of us have to be Pharaoh’s men. One long march upward. Even the reindeer had shivered, their teeth clattering and lichen breath coming in clouds in the cold air. They'd had to slaughter the poor bastards for meat and fur. Francis had done most of the dirty work himself. There's always got to be an executioner. Her Majesty's carnifex. Some of us are quicker with the knife.

"We brought those deer a thousand miles north from Norway. Only to slaughter them on the ice."

"That was the ice that made me want to be a master," Tom muses. "The way it kept moving us back."

"Mm. It was rough ice," Francis agrees. Twenty years ago. He and Tom had been different men then. Thirty years old and broad-backed. A few fewer freckles, a bit more hair. They had left from Spitsbergen in June 1827, with the _Enterprise_ and _Endeavor_ both worked up as sledges. Over the ice, simple enough, and onward to the Pole. That was when Francis had learned that the ice will do as it likes, no matter what prayers you set into it like picks and flares. They'd meant to walk yet the ice floes had drifted south each day, up to four miles at a time. "The deer couldn't haul on it. We knew that in a day. But we kept them anyway. Ferrying deer from ice floe to ice floe...by boat, thinking we could use them by and by. Rowing reindeer in our sleigh boats! Like proper little ladies… in ostrich carts." He pauses, frowning. "They were so confused. Is that us... now? Confused, out of our depth?"

 _Is that us now? In the middle of the sea, the waters coming in from both sides? Nowhere out but up or down. To God or the devil with you and nowhere else._ He thinks about God. What they look like to a bird's eye view, God parting his throne of clouds and peeking down, like blinking an eye open while sleeping through the third act. A fly in a web, the sealed leads and cracks in the ice spun out like silk. What comes for them? He doesn't know. Immobility is death for the living. In a dog-eat-dog world, if you're not stuffing your face, you may as well climb in the pot. His father had thought a lot about God, dragging sermons in with the Sunday paper. Francis doesn't have a mind for Bibles, he prefers to leave God to the experts. 

"We've seen worse than this, you and me. And I know you saw much worse south, with Sir James. I've heard other versions than yours. I know them to be reliable." 

"This is different." Different. A storm is a battle you can weather; this is a siege. 

"Aye," Blanky nods, looking out at the night. "You trusted Ross and you trusted Parry."

"Either you're a clairvoyant or I'm not doing half the job I think I am concealing my thoughts."

"No," Tom laughs, shaking his head. "It's just that I know you."

"What will it do to us, the ice? If no leads get found and we have to spend another winter here." He doesn't ask about the promise of a thaw in the coming spring, he knows the rations well enough. What will the ice do now, entering the terrible twos? 

Tom considers. "Without a thaw to clear last winter's ice, it will start to back up and then pile up high. Like one whole country being squeezed into the borders of another. 

"It'll push the boats up." Two forces driving together, tectonic plates colliding, driving ice up like alpines. He thinks of their ships at the top of the pile, impaled on the ice like a shrike's nest. 

"Aye, I've seen boats forced twenty, thirty feet in the jam."

Francis is silent. "Can we survive that amount of pressure?"

"If it drives us up, yeah, we'll ride it," Tom says. He presses his mouth into a thin line. "It could also drive us under."

"Snap our beams and crush us at the waist." 

Imagine a world underwater, the water coming in from both sides. The deep blue sea and her hungry hands, gripping you by the ankles. It doesn't matter if you can swim when the ice is above you, there's no room to come up for air. 

He feels cold. "Let's pray for the former, then," Francis mutters. 

The devil will drag you under.


	4. Chapter 4

_HMS Erebus  
_ _June 1847_

North again. 

The north is wild. The south is where the legends are buried, yes, but the north is where nothing can be tamed. The north is where we put the unwanted. Think of churches, how we bury the unwanted on the north side. The suicides and the unbaptized, the violent and the damned. James has no sway in this realm; he was born in another strange land in the south, brighter and bolder. The north owes nothing to him. It wonders why he's here.

Yet here he is again, standing on the upper deck, balancing the sun on his shoulders. Look here, look outward, the white ice that surrounds you. Consumes you. How far must you walk before the white gives way to grey? How far before the open water? How far away is green? James closes his eyes, imagining trees and grass. Remembering the smell of spring. Remembering the stain of chlorophyll on his childhood trousers, the gritty mud on his hands and face. 

Do you remember warmth, James? Do you remember a land that loved you back? It's summer at the 69th parallel north. What does that mean? To touch metal might give frostbite but won't tear your skin. The thermometers read zero. After the winter, zero seems nearly kind. Bury the doubt, cover it up. There's nothing to be done. Pull the ice anchors, pull your questions. We're in it now. 

Try to make the best of it until the stores run dry. Carry on, soldier. Go on, give us a smile.

* * *

If you want to throw a ball, you’ll need something to wear.

Below, deep on the lower deck, several chests are stashed and filled with costumes and props. James brushes the hair from his face, leaning over an open chest. He pulls out masks and glittering ribbon, running them between his long fingers.

The dress is soft. He brushes a hand against the fabric, against velvet and silk, thinking not of any dance he's seen but of one he has only read about, held thousands of miles south, still on _Erebus_ ' decks. _Why can I not stop thinking of this? That damned dance you held with Ross, why do I keep coming back to it?_ Even when Francis is nowhere to be found, it's hard to shake off the weight of his watch. No one has ever left their sight on him like _Terror_ 's captain does, piling his watch upon James like heavy stones. It is oppressive. Pressing. You can die by pressing, it is an old execution method for witchcraft. Back in September 1692, far across the ocean, they’d piled the stones on, one by one until the bones cracked and the breath went. (The books all wave it away, saying _this doesn’t really count, it only happened once._ It had mattered very much to the pressed Giles Corey, dead and flat.)

Sooner or later, Francis will get his fork into the meat of him and bite down on the truth. Here is a secret, James can tell you why he has been chosen for this expedition and it's always been about boots. Franklin might eat them but James licks them, always hoping for scraps of advancement. The taste is the same. Win some, lose some. Either way, you're always spitting out dirt.

He sighs. The dress smells musty and ancient. James holds it up to his chest, pressed against his white vest, wondering how the sloped shoulders and neckline might look on his body. Imagine someone else. Higher rank and smaller build, standing in this very space, opening his own trunk. What color dress had Ross pulled out and held up to the light? Pale blue, holding court over the ice? A rich green perhaps, the color of lichen and moss, grass and leaves. The color of everything left behind. James frowns, leaning in, wondering what sort of mockery he might make of the whole idea. 

Sometimes he feels as if he shouldn't be here. When James had been chosen for the expedition north, he had written to his brother, William Coningham, straight away. He'd asked after William and his wife Elizabeth, given love to their children, and shared the news. 

_As Barrow'd promised, the expedition this spring is a go. We'll look to set off in May, hoping to make to Lancaster Sound before the winter. Though there had been talk of fitting my name for command, I must confess in the strict confidence between us, that after speaking with Sir John Ross and reading a French account of northern voyages, I am glad to place trust in those who have been to the Arctic before. Franklin has been kind, inviting me for tea this Thursday last to discuss the plans and direction of the voyage. I have not yet met with Crozier, who I admit to being keen to speak with, for he is the true veteran of the two, having sailed with Parry twice for the Passage and once again for the North Pole, and then again with Ross in the Antarctic._

There have been other letters, most of which remain unsent, locked in a drawer. There is no one to give it to, no postbox to swallow it up. When he looks at his own letters from two years ago, it feels like stepping back into another lifetime. Two years ago, James had put pen to paper, thinking of the end. He had assumed they would have completed the Passage by winter, as they all had. ( _Except you, Francis. Except you._ ) He'd had plans for the journey after. In August 1845, he'd written of how he hoped to leave the ships when they ported in Russia and take an overland route to Saint Petersburg, then onto London, being first to bear the news of success to Britain. He’d promised to bring back a little treasure for the children, maybe even a piece of ice if he could be quick enough.

What a farce.

I'm going to ask you about your childhood. What do you remember? At Rose Hill, two boys. James and his brother William. It's easy to say two men are equal and harder to live by it. Will, dark-haired and quiet, had an inheritance. James did not. Will had someone to call mother, someone to call father. James climbed into the same laps, naming his guardians as aunt and uncle. There had never been someone to call mother. Never someone to call father. Children hear everything. His ears had been big enough to catch the gossip, rumors of who his own true father might be. Sir James Gambier, riddled with debts and children and still weak for any skirt, always had seemed likely enough. James didn't understand then why he had been left out. If Gambier had been his true father, then he had had plenty of legal children, surely one more snuck in with the milk wouldn't hurt?

No one else in the Coningham family had been to sea, so when he was sent to the Navy, James had assumed the order had come from his birth father. He remembers his own face, reflected back at him in the silver he’d polished, age twelve upon the HMS _Pyramus_. Even now, he finds his own face in every apple-cheeked new recruit. They wear their new uniforms with eagerness while they’re sent to mop up sick. He shakes their hands when they come aboard and tells them the best way to get sick out of wool. All held together for the love of a ship. A ship. A mother, a father, a brother, a sister. Lover and villain too. The ships were designed to each carry sixty men easily and naturally, the Admiralty had squeezed on a few more. The coffins kept in the hold weren't for show, everyone knew they'd lose a few men here and there. A touch of influenza, a hint of scurvy. Man overboard and all that. None of them worried about being one of the lost. That's the thing about signing your life away, you always assume you'll get what you came for.

James tucks the dress under his arm and hangs it on the hook in his cabin.

* * *

"How comes the dance?" Franklin asks, looking over toward James in his chair near the window.

"He's been nothing but difficult," James mutters, pushing a pawn forward on the chess table. "Dragging his feet over each and every little detail. I can't make him out. He's a miserable man."

(Francis had balked at any mention of the dance. "Will you not help?" James had asked, lingering after a command meeting. His tone had been short. Francis had not looked up. Maps were spread out over the sturdy table and he walked a compass over them like a sweetheart. 

“Nothing needs my assistance. Lieutenant Little shall be at your disposal for any work required of _Terror_.”

“Francis. Come now." He had sighed. "Can you dance at least? Might I count on that _one_ saving grace?"

"Anyone can dance," Francis had snapped.

"Well, that's patently untrue."

Even from the corner of his eye, Francis’ glare had been impossible to miss. “I’ve a ship to run, James. I would that you’d leave me to it.”

James had turned on his heel and marched out, fury hitching a ride on his shoulders. Later, a report had come of _Terror_ ’s costume inventory and what refreshments their stores might offer, written in Francis’ own hand.)

Franklin sighs now, drumming his fingers on the desk. "I fear some of that may be my own fault." He looks up, pale-eyed and weak-chinned. "We had been nearly friends once, you know."

James does know, he's heard every rumor. Still, he stays silent, letting Franklin speak. 

"He'd taken quite a liking to my Sophy back in, oh, I believe it was 1843. That was when they visited us there in Van Diemen's Land, of course. He'd proposed marriage to her even then, though I cannot imagine what had gotten into him. Two weeks they'd known each other. Two weeks! Of course, I was against it from the start. He's a fine sort but not quite ... Well - " 

"Not quite what you might have hoped for Miss Cracroft?"

Franklin looks up. "Does anyone wish an explorer upon their loved ones?"

James breathes in, shaking his head. "I cannot imagine so." 

"Yes," Franklin says, looking at him consideringly. James has a wild moment of feeling seen through. Franklin had been there once when James was invited to a Wives and Sweethearts dance. _I don't have the former,_ James had laughed, _and do not wish the latter._ No one looks closely to see if you wish for love, only whether or not it's in your arms. Love, much like money, only matters if you have it. He has taken care to keep his hands clean; no one ever bothers with an empty bowl. 

“I _am_ burdened by it, James. I must imagine that the very wound is fresh still, Francis proposed to Sophy a second time only just before we sailed. And, well, look about us!" Franklin spreads his hands wide to the Great Cabin. "Is there anyone here to drive it from mind?” He laughs miserably, shaking his head. “No, I do fear he holds it against me.”

 _Did he love her?_ James wonders. _Does he still?_ It is presumptuous to assume he knows anything more of Francis than Franklin does. Still, he remembers the day they had sailed from Greenhithe. James had kept watch on Francis, constantly curious about the Irishman, still unable to read him. As they had pulled up the gangplanks and the anchors, Francis had watched Ross instead. James has never been in love but he imagines lovers eat slowly, saving the best for last. No sailor in love would go over the horizon with anyone else in sight. (Worse still, he has never been in love. What if his idea of love is more than what real love is? What if love itself cannot hold a candle to what he has imagined it to be?)

"You should not let it consume you, you have no obligation but to your own family and interests. You said it yourself, Sir John, if there was no match, well … " He trails off. The charges leveled at Francis are damning enough for the marriage bed, he tries to ignore his own licking at his boots. If Francis might be middle-born, then James was born to nothing at all. No name, no place. No arms to hold him save for the grip of rumor. "Think of the lead parties. They should return soon and with good news and God's grace, we'll start again," James says, nodding half to himself as he speaks. "We could be through to the west by end of summer." 

"Yes," Franklin nods. "We shall wait and see."

Waiting. Wait for the lead parties. Wait for a thaw. Wait for a dance, to sleep, the next meal, an open hand. Why is every moment held in reserve for another? I ask you why you seek the Passage and the answers are all the same. For glory, for trade. For a better waiting room to pass the time until you die. Tell me where you're going with all that gold; you cannot take it with you. Tell me what you'll do when you find the Northwest Passage, if you would even recognize it while you sailed through. What are you looking for? We talk of freedom and are slaves to the chase of it.

Sailor, what will you find when you get there?

Morale is hard to come by in the dead of night. Franklin had stretched his arm out and pointed northwest, telling his men that the Passage was already theirs. Look there, it's waiting. It's lonely, it's getting cold. We promised to meet, let's not be late. When James had first seen this place, blank and covered in ice, it had looked like a package wrapped in beautiful paper and silver ribbon, just waiting for him to open it. He walks the upper deckwith his hands in his pockets and chewing on his lower lip. Nothing in the landscape to look at, still the same two ships caught in the ice. Like a pair of vermin caught in traps, waiting to starve. 

The night before the masque, James dreams of two icebergs colliding, both the size of mountains. Franklin and Barrow stand on the upper deck, picking ice out of their eyebrows and patting the iron-reinforced hull. _"Just the thing,"_ they say, _"They'll storm us now and we'll crack them down the center, like Zeus and his lightning. We should be all cheer, James."_ The ice presses closer and the wind picks up. James finds he likes it best when the wind howls; it drowns out the sound of snapping beams. 

He wakes, shirt soaked with sweat and blinking hard, half-expecting his room to be run through by the brutal pack and the ground to be covered with icicles of frozen men. 

* * *

_Erebus'  
_ _Royal Arctic Assembly Rooms  
_ _at King William Land  
_ _Sanctioned by Authority_

_Grand Masque_

_The public is respectfully informed that a grand Masquerade and Fancy Ball will take place at the above rooms, on Thursday next, the 4th of June (1847). Quadrilles, Waltzes, Country Dances will agreeably fill up the intervals of the amusements. Two celebrated performers of the violin are engaged for the occasion and every exertion on the part of the managers to contribute to the hilarity and brilliancy of the scene._

_The doors will be opened at half-past five, and commence at six precisely._

_N.B. No person will be admitted without Domino or Fancy Dress._

* * *

_June 4th, 1847_

  
  


It is a quarter to six. Paper flowers sit in red-painted tins. If you're not paying attention, you can almost smell the roses.

It had taken the better part of a week to put the event together. The scheduling had at least been simple; no one here has anywhere else to be. The excitement had been catching and James had overheard the crew swapping needles and thread, putting their costumes together. _Can you oblige me the loan of a bonnet_ had been overheard in the orlop. _Will you spare a few ribbons_ had been heard on the upper deck.

Tonight, the costumes glitter and a thick pride swells in James' chest. Francis may have been no help but still, the masque had come off well. Laughter bounces off the decks, the ice, and catches in the sails. Men can be made glad enough by a little something extra snuck upon their plate. Anything that might interrupt the weekly slog of salt pork and biscuits, plum-duff and pea soup. A little extra grog, a pudding with dried plums, you'd be surprised what will pull someone back from the edge. You can string a man along for years on just the promise of ale and bread. James is in a rich cerulean dress, the neck wide and deep and his bare shoulders grateful for the relative warmth of the room. He’s pinned his hair up and curled it at the sides. Women’s costumes have always been popular aboard ships, ever since Parry had sought to entertain his wintering crews with theatre in 1819. Since then, costumes and dress have been a critical supply aboard and this is far from James’ first time tying a corset or pulling on petticoats. A few others have opted for the dresses as well; Thomas Jopson looks well in dark violet and William Closson has favored a pale green. The other costumes are wide and varied. A ghost, a country squire, a ballad singer, a prince. 

Through it all, though it is drawing near six, Francis is nowhere to be found. James frowns, his eyes sliding from face to face and finding _Terror_ 's captain in none of them.

When the crowd parts for a moment, James realizes his mistake. On a ship, he is used to finding Francis at ease in the center of the floor. He knows the steady captain's walk. The voice of command. James had not thought to look to the walls, had not thought to find Francis shifting uneasily in the shadow, frowning and holding one uncertain hand behind his back. Something twists in his belly, remembering a shadow of this at an Admiralty party. Francis is dressed as a soldier and would not be out of place at Waterloo. Francis' hussar jacket tucks in nicely at the waist, his eyes gleam against the brighter shade of blue. What would Francis look like in another color? In anything other than blue and white, black and grey? Imagine it, will you? What would it look like if James were to wrap Francis in his own burgundy dressing gown, sliding the silk along those tired shoulders?

James shakes his head, wondering what's gotten into him.

"Look at you," Le Vesconte laughs as James passes. "You're butter upon bacon in that get-up."

"I daresay," Lieutenant Hodgson says. "James, you've got tiger stripes!"

He pauses, skirts rustling around him. Hodgson gestures with glass in hand, pointing toward James' neck. James raises a hand and runs it along the exposed nape and down to the low scoop of the back, feeling the raised scars along his upper right shoulder. 

"Oh," he grins. "Rather took a claw to the shoulder a few years back."

"The cheetah? That's a fun story," Le Vesconte asks. "Go on, tell that again."

"More fun for _you,_ you're not the one whose back was sliced open. You were there, you tell the damned thing.”

“It all began when James got the mad idea - “

“It was hardly _my_ idea -“

The music pauses. Six o’clock. He swallows and glances at Francis, finding that, as always, he is looking back. James feels the flush climb into his cheeks. The weight of Francis Crozier's stare is very heavy indeed. With an excuse, he makes his way to where Francis lingers at the edge of the room.

“Right. That’s our cue, I suppose. Shall we open this thing?” 

“Better to get it over with,” Francis grumbles. He beckons to Little and Le Vesconte, who are to complete their quadrille, and stands awkwardly. as if suddenly forgetting where to hold his arms and place his feet. When he takes James’ hand, his palms are damp, his skin rough. James finds himself instinctively memorizing the lay of his calluses, finding they match his own. He has never touched Francis before, not until just now. He doesn’t know why he is surprised to find his skin so warm. 

The music starts and the movements come, easy and practiced. Endlessly familiar. Still, despite the violins and the chatter in the background, it feels deathly quiet. Francis scarcely touches his hand, barely grazing it and only when he must. His mouth is pressed in a firm, disapproving line and he seems to avoid looking at James at all, eyes kept directly forward instead. The very picture of a soldier. James wonders if Francis had held Ross like this, at arm's length and half-scalding. Was it in this very room that Francis had danced this same dance with Ross, his hands skittish upon Ross' hands, their boots driving the dirt into these selfsame floorboards? 

“Are you determined not to speak to me, Francis?” The whiskey and gin have flowed easily. He finds himself bending his long neck, knowing how the light gathers on his collarbones. Francis does not blink.

“I have nothing to say.”

“It’s just a ball. A dance. One night of forgetting where we are in this - " He tightens his jaw, looking around. "In this damned ice and powdering our hair till we fall down blind. Surely even you can - “

“ _Even I_?” Francis asks, raising a brow. James flushes, angry for some reason he cannot pinpoint. 

“Try to be merry, at least for the men. Put on a brave face, talking to me cannot be the worst of all things.”

“You underestimate yourself, James,” Francis says, but there’s a twitch at the corners of his mouth. It's teasing. James wants to see it take over his face. He wonders how happiness would go and cannot fathom how the other man might wear it. There are ideas he has heard, saying that all possibilities might exist within the Universe. Perhaps, if he extrapolates, there is a world in which Francis Crozier is mild and carefree. James has a sudden strange urge to start over, to try again from the beginning. Get a different ending.

“I daresay I can make you laugh by the end of the evening.”

“Tell me," Francis says, a whiskey-flavored humor lacing his words. "Are there more jaunts to your guano adventure that I've not yet been subject to?” 

Strange to want to kiss a man and not know if he'd hang you or bed you. James has never touched a man aboard ship; he knows better than to fuck where the floggings are. He'd been thirteen at most when he'd seen his first man lashed. Held down by two able seamen, the crack of the whip running a red line down his back better than a knife. One had sliced so deep, the muscle was seen. Pink and bloody, just like a cut of beef waiting for stew. He tries not to think of it, he keeps his nose clean and keeps himself off a plate. 

He looks up and Francis is watching his mouth. He feels as if he’s missed something. A quadrille is a square dance, trading partners with each turn. Each moment without Francis feels like an interruption. The dance ends and the floor fills for the next, princes and jesters pairing up two by two. James stands to the side, breathing harder than he should need to. Francis is silent beside him. When he shifts, the gold braid of his jacket catches the light, streaming in through the Preston Patent Illuminators. Everything glitters. James follows the jacket's sleeves to his hands, the faint memory of their warmth still smeared on his own. His stays are tight, his breath more limited than usual. (Imagine those hands at your waist, in the bend before your hip. Imagine the way he might cup your body in a waltz, the way he'd brush the loosened hair from your face. Imagine another night, one where no one is looking. Even the two of you.) 

James flushes and blames it on the dance. _It's nothing, it's just been a long time._ Touch is foreign to him. Touch is always our first language and you can lose even your native tongue if you do not speak it. 

"And how shall you tell this fine tale?" Francis asks. The words might be baiting but his voice is all softness. "When you do, erase the number of times I might have stepped on your feet." He pauses. "Or add more."

James chuckles. "It adds color though."

Francis turns to him and pauses, then gestures toward James' back. "Er, your - "

A dark brow stabs downward as James frowns. "Pardon?"

"You've a ribbon undone."

He tries to reach but cannot quite see the ribbon. "Dammit."

"May I?" Francis asks quietly. James holds his breath and nods. The moment is as tight as a wire and he walks as carefully as a funambulist across it. _You're not doing anything wrong. This is no more than a steward would do, tightening an undone lace. Anyone would do it. Dundy would do it and wouldn't even blink._ It doesn't feel like _nothing._ James cannot quite see the ribbon but, from his periphery, he can watch the way Francis moves with deft efficiency. It is fascinating to see him work, to feel the pressure of capable hands pulling at the dress, tying the ribbon at his waist. What else have these hands done? James drinks up the unexpected touch. 

“Do you want a drink?” His throat is very dry. It's hard to breathe. He's heard stories of dresses being restrictive, yet he feels dangerously independent. He thinks of his own uniform, tunic and trousers, by turns both freeing and fettering. Perhaps the only freedom is in the few moments when you take one off and put another on. Every manacle chafes eventually, no matter how well-lined.

Francis looks at him. “More than anything in the world.”

“A capital dance, my dear fellows!” Franklin says, landing a hand on both their shoulders. James swallows a cringe. Francis straightens, once again stiff-backed. “James, I daresay crinolines suit you.”

James laughs. “I hold no candle to Miss Ross, I'm sure, but I endeavored to do my best. For Queen and country, that is.” The words are already falling out of his mouth and James wants to gather them up, shove them back in. Swallow them down. _I’m sorry for the words in my mouth, I wish there were none._

Francis looks as if he had swallowed acid. James watches as his jaw tightens and Francis, still with one hand behind his back, drains the glass in his hand and takes his leave. All night, James cannot forget the angry glint in his eye. The wounded shape of his brow. _Let me walk it back, take it back._ It would be worse still to say anything at all. No, better to say nothing, pretend it was nothing. They already only have scorched earth between them, what’s a little more?

It is near midnight when he finds his way back to his cabin and the sun is still high in the air. The bright sunlight streams down through the illuminator in the center of his ceiling and James can see too much of his tired face in the small mirror near the lantern. The lines dig deep beneath his eyes and darken the edges of his thin mouth. He had seen his reflection in the silver and glass of the dance, but now, alone in his cabin with his hair undone, his shoulders seem barer than before. He brings a hand to his waist, just there at the ribbons of his lower back, pressing slightly. As if by mimicking how Francis had touched him once, he might have it again. 

_I need to stop._ He shakes his head and washes his face. The water in the basin, as always, is cold. 

James lays in bed, his shirt loose around him. The dress hung up on the hook near the door. Tomorrow, he will air it out and pack it away again. Perhaps in a few months or a year, he’ll unpack it with wine-fueled hopes and try again. He groans, closing his eyes. Exhausted. Perhaps tomorrow will be better after his scant breakfast and a cup of tea. The mind is not so separate from the body, a stale biscuit might do wonders for his nerve. A bit of jam may straighten out his spine.

He tries to think about the lead parties. Perhaps Lieutenant Gore will return tomorrow, bringing news of open water. _We'll be out in the spring, no measures required,_ Franklin had said, patting James on the back. During the day, James tells stories to entertain, spinning them out of sticks and pieces of thread. At night, he tells other stories to himself. Tonight, he would like to be warm. He closes his eyes and imagines somewhere where the sun is gold and never silver. Rome has always been a favorite of his, so James thinks of Rome. The colonies of cats who rule over broken forums. The wide cobblestones and glittering marble. He had loved the way the skyline had cupped the sunset, he had loved spending his evenings out in the air, watching night steal over. He closes his eyes and imagines glancing over a table, his coffee still hot. There is a man seated nearby, one leg crossed over another, half-asleep with a book open in his lap. 

"Pardon me, but do I know you?" James might ask. The stranger would blink his eyes open and shake his head. His fair hair would look nearly red in the sunset. His eyes a bright blue. 

"No, I don't believe so," he would say, placing a slip of paper in his book and closing it. "Francis Crozier." 

His eyes would widen, spinning out on ice. " _Captain_ Crozier?"

"So I am told," Francis would say wryly. "Are you a naval man yourself then?"

"Excuse me, that was an abominable introduction. I've simply heard a great deal about your time in the south with Sir James Clark Ross. James Fitzjames, most recently of the _Clio_."

Francis might raise a brow, recognizing his name from old rosters and discussions. "I seem to recall James wanting you aboard with us as a gunnery lieutenant."

"I was sent east instead."

"East?"

"To China." There would be a tale on his tongue but James would hold it in place.

"Of course," Francis would nod.

 _Yes,_ James imagines. _That's how it could have gone in another lifetime, another universe, another story._ He runs a hand along his thin belly, feeling the taut skin. His skin prickles still, the ghost of hands still against his own. Replaying the quiet amusement that had found its way to Francis' face. His hands run over his own throat, still bare, feeling a thrill at having had so much of himself seen. There had been hunger there, James had been half-certain of it. But memory's a tall tale, lying in bed, James wonders how much of it was his own want reflected back at him. How much of it had he made up, half-drunk on Allsopp's and wanting to be wanted?

This is a strange place, he does not understand it. All worlds have their edges, sometimes we find those liminal spaces. Rules are different here.

 _"We're nearly to the western charts,"_ Franklin had said and it echoes in his memory now, his face half-buried in a pillow and _Erebus_ groaning around him in the night. _"The Passage is all but ours, gentlemen."_ James closes his eyes and he dreams of sailing through the Passage. Tonight, behind closed eyes, the Passage is green and warm and someone with careful hands brushes the hair away from his tired face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The wording for the masque's invitation is taken directly from the invitation for the Grand Venetian Carnival held upon the _Fury_ in 1824.


	5. Chapter 5

_November 1843  
_ _Government House, Van Diemen's Land_

A girl and a boy sitting in a sunlit parlor. In another life, they might have been friends.

Yes, let us talk of Sophia. She is a part of this too.

“You don’t love me. Not in the way of marriage.” Sophia Cracroft's book lies open in her lap. She looks him quite squarely in the eye. Lies are harder to come by when there’s nowhere to run for cover. The late afternoon sunlight burnishes her hair into a lovely gold. Her necklace has settled prettily into the hollow of her throat. Her eyes, as she turns them on him, are kind. Francis shifts on the sofa, determined to love her.

It had been autumn the first time he had seen her. The Franklins had invited both Francis and James Clark Ross to a dinner party. Sophia hadn't looked at him, not at first, but Francis had felt his sight drawn to her. He watched the curve of her back, the long fingers, the oval chin. Heard the light laughter, as beautiful as a church bell calling men to prayer. What had she worn then? He has forgotten the color of her dress. It had been red perhaps. A bright coquelicot, red as a poppy. Or a shade of pink? The bodice had caught the light well in its silken thread, but he cannot remember the exact depth. There had been a time when he could. (It troubles him that it has taken him this long to notice. That he almost does not seem to mind.) _Hello_ , she had said, long lashes low. She was like the women he had at times watched from afar, never daring to speak up. He had watched her catch her own reflection in the mirror. She leaned into the glass and pulled the pale curls back from her face and at once Francis had fallen in love with the idea of her. He had loved her instantly, for the delicate curve of her shoulder, the teasing lilt of her voice. He had loved the smallness of her, the way he could cup her in his own two hands. 

“I could." _I could love you if you allowed me to try._

“But you do not," she says, shaking her head. "Francis, no wife wishes to be a placeholder in her husband’s heart.”

“I could make you happy," he insists. "We could be happy.” He could love her. Look, she's beautiful. She's the apple of God's eye. Golden and bright, shaking her head from a few feet away. He would love her if she would let him. He could learn. It could be enough. It would be. He would buy her jewelry and champagne. Veuve Clicquot. The finest for her. 

“You do. You could,” Sophia says. “But it’s not enough.”

Francis nods but doesn't understand. He wonders what others' loves are made of, if they are bigger than his or stronger than his. If they taste better, if they fit more easily. No one has sought his love. He's used to putting his heart out on a plate like a dish at supper, expecting there will be plenty leftover for him to take home after. 

Why is it that we’re more afraid of our hopes than our scars? Francis would strip his jacket from his back and scrape his history from the books, handing it over without a second look. He wants to come to love with each dark tallymark against him already known and accounted for. _I have no secrets,_ the lonely of us boast, plying our would-be lovers with a litany of our worst deeds, asking them to get on with it. To get the judgment over with. But he, like all the wounded, does keep secrets. He keeps his hopes tucked in an inner pocket. He keeps his dreams in a lockbox buried under the floor. Why is it the most baring and damning of all to ask for something honestly wanted?

“Look,” she says, touching his hand, “Come sit and watch the sunset with me.” His stomach warms. He thinks of beauty. Sophia is beautiful, he knows this. Gentle. An oval face. Bright eyes. She wears lavender oil and lace that leaves marks on his skin when he holds her too tight. He looks at her, then the reddening sky, hiding his bitten fingernails in the palm of his rough hand. 

There is a difference between falling in love and wanting to love. One is about your lover. The other is about you. He doesn't need to ask which this is.

When he takes his leave, setting his hat tightly upon his head and descending the front steps of the Franklin residence, Francis looks east and west. To the east, both _Terror_ and _Erebus_ are docked, waiting for him to step aboard, to settle in. To the west, a road runs to somewhere unknown where no one knows his name. Sometimes he thinks about going west. They say dreams are kept there. They say if you can make it through the Passage, clear to the other side, you can have anything you want. Those with empty hands know the value of a wish. 

He tucks her name into his pocket, hiding it there for safekeeping. We are always a little in love with the lives we could have led, whether or not they suited us. 

Sophia, her name is Sophia. Hair like fool's gold. Yes.

They might have once been friends.

* * *

_June 11th, 1847_ _  
__Somewhere off King William Island, in the ice._

Francis walks slowly between _Terror_ and _Erebus_ , his hands in his pockets, thinking of the dead.

The western lead party had returned in the middle of the night; Lieutenant Graham Gore had not been among their number. Francis had been on _Erebus_ late into the night, questioning the party. Once in his own bed, he had held his hands together over his belly and stared at the ceiling without sleep. 

It had been a long night. 

_("How long did you search for Lieutenant Gore before you decided to leave him?"_

_"We searched for a half-mile in each direction, sir.")_

The day has been born into silence. Francis says nothing, biting his lower lip, feeling the dread climb his spine. _This is only the beginning._ There's a particular horror about riding into a battle when no one else around you has noticed the gunshots yet. What will claim him? Illness? The scurvy that haunts every ship, the consumption that licks at their lungs? A fall on the ice, disorientation in a storm? Freezing to death seems kindest, as if you might fall asleep with each part of your body shutting down one by one by one. 

_("Then how can you be certain he was killed?"_

_"The amount of blood, sir, on the ice. No man could have survived losing so much.")_

_Go with God, Graham._ He doesn't know where the lieutenant's body lays now, lost in the pale expanse, so he will offer memory instead. How long has it been since that fresh-faced child had come aboard the _Dotterel_ with wide-eyes and a loud laugh? He had been thirteen then, in 1820, just as Francis had been eleven years before. For a year, they had sailed on the _Dotterel_ together, Francis as Mate and Gore as a volunteer. He had taken to the sea easily, Francis had found him agreeable enough and indulged him with stories and tips. 

Twenty-seven years ago. Francis had been with him on his first voyage and now, fixing an image of the man with an easy smile and straight nose in his mind, he realizes he has been with Gore on his last too. How many more men? It's a ravenous world out there. It'll swallow them all if it chooses.

_("You say this with complete authority on the subject?"_

_"I do, sir.")_

He had picked at his breakfast. Meat and porridge. It tasted like salt. Out here, everything tastes like salt. He has forgotten the taste of freshness. He has forgotten the flavor of a raw onion, the taste of an apple, a freshly-picked blackberry. He does not remember the tang of blood in fresh meat, he cannot recall the soft flavor of creamline milk. An egg. Consider a humble egg. Francis has not tasted one in two years. It's strange. Sometimes he feels dead already.

Francis looks about _Erebus_ ' Great Cabin. He knocks cautiously upon the doorframe where Franklin sits writing. "My condolences, Sir John," he begins hesitantly. "Amongst everything else, I know you mourn a friend." 

"Thank you," Franklin says, sitting back from his desk. The cabin is cold. Even in summer, the cold is ruthless. Francis rubs his hands, coaxing the blood back to his fingers. 

"I apologize for the timing of this request. But its virtue's in its speed," Francis pauses, swallowing before continuing. "I'd like permission to send a sledge party out. South. Not for leads this time. For rescue."

"Where?"

"The Hudson Bay Company outpost on Great Slave Lake. If the party leaves now, they'll have three full months to get there before winter comes in force." A possible rescue impossibly situated. He can see the image of the outpost on his maps, can remember the feel of his compass as he has walked it from here to there, over and over and over again, trying to imagine the feel of ice and shale beneath his boots. He has walked the ice before, he might do it again. 

"That is _eight-hundred_ miles, Francis." The stare Franklin offers is blank and offended. His long face rumples in distaste. "No - I do not grant permission."

He sighs inwardly. A fight again, always a fight. "At least tell me you understand why I'm suggesting it."

"You are suggesting it because you are a man who's happiest with a glass of knock-me-down in one hand and an alarm bell in the other." 

Francis flinches. It feels like a blow. It’s easy enough to sense false love, our skin crawls when we’re near it, we beg those near us to reassure us or to lay it plain. We’d rather know now than to keep sewing ourselves to someone about to tear the thread. Still, Francis nearly cups his hand to his cheek, just to gentle the sting. He grits his teeth. 

"I'm suggesting it because if this cold continues and we find ourselves overwintering again in this ice, help must already be on its way, come spring, if we are to survive. I'd rather send out eight men now, for a long, unnecessary walk, than risk a necessary one for all of us in a year."

A long march toward warm beds and full bellies. He stares Franklin in the eye, trying to will the taste of boot leather into the other man’s mouth. Trying to make him remember the way frozen bodies look like sleeping men, how you never know if a man is alive or dead until you check his pulse. How in the dark and the cold, when the wind stings like a thousand nettles, one can consider a great many things. Reason is the privilege of a comfortable bed. 

But Franklin’s eyes only grow harder at the idea of walking. His chin raises as Francis speaks. "I will not allow it.” Franklin straightens, moving forward. “What signal would that send to the men?"

What signal? What does it matter? They are eating their rations and when their rations run dry, they'll hunt the rats. Imagine a plucked rat on a silver platter, cooked and trussed like a bird. You cannot conceal lost hope forever, no matter how you might try. He has an image of Franklin tying a clean white napkin to his throat, talking of God while taking apart a rat by knife and fork. 

"It's not the men I'm concerned about signaling. No one knows where we are." No one. The world is silent here. The north has swallowed them up and held a finger to her lips, keeping their position a secret. How many letters has he written with their position noted at the top? How many maps has he looked over, fingers walking from this ship's graveyard across the Atlantic, to Banbridge and London too? Home seems desperately far away. 

"That is how you already see us? In need of saving?"

"I do." Francis keeps his expression grim and even, his hand behind his back. A sailor to his captain. Nothing more, nothing less. 

"Yet your prediction last year about the terrifying winter we'd spend in the pack did not come true."

"Not to the degree I feared, but that will change, should there again be no thaw. It is a Captain's duty, after all, to mind for the worst case, not for the one he hopes for."

"Oh, so, now I must hear you instruct me in a Captain's duties.” 

"It's only eight men, Sir John. And there is just enough time.

"I have lost six men on this expedition to date. Six!” Franklin snaps. “And you ask me to risk more than doubling that number trekking over distant ground where you know I have lost men in years past. I'll hear no more of this. I will not lose another man, Francis."

 _You do not understand what is at risk. Why are you so willfully blind?_ "We may lose all our men. That is what my alarm is ringing now, Sir John. And I - I am at a loss why yours is not.”

Franklin flares, advancing on him. "You are the worst kind of second, Francis," Franklin declares. His eyes are flinty, his weak chin raised. "You abuse your freedoms. You complain in the safety of speculation, you claim foresight in disasters that never happen, and you are weak in your vices because your rank affords you privacy and deference.” He inhales, his voice growing louder as the words follow. “You've made yourself miserable and distant, and hard to love, and you blame the world for it. I'm not the sailor you are, Francis, never will be. But you will never be fit for command. And, as your Captain, I take some responsibility for that. For the vanity of your outlook. I should have curbed these tendencies, rather than sympathized with them, because you seem to have confused my sympathy with tolerance, but there is a limit to how much I can tolerate, and that is where we are presently standing!” Franklin shakes his head. 

Sharp teeth dig into the meat of Francis’ cheek, like tearing chicken breast from bone. Blood again. The only fresh meat he tastes out here is his own. His eyes are hot and wet, more salt in the wound. His mouth furious and pressed in an angry line. 

Thank God no one is listening. You know how sound travels.

Franklin continues, bellowing through the Great Cabin. “There are some things we were never meant to be to one another. I see that now. Friends... on my side. Relations on yours. So let us turn our energies back to being what the Admiralty, and life, have seen fit to make us. We should give that our best. There can be no argument between us there." He pauses, inhaling. "Now, you must excuse me. I have a Service to finish writing for tomorrow. It will have to act as the only eulogy our boy Graham will be given out here, and I intend it to sing."

His throat is tight. He swallows. Franklin writes again, putting care to paper and not to the man before him.

When he shuts the door behind himself, movement catches Francis' eye. Fitzjames stands outside, waiting to have his own audience. His eyes wide and trained on Francis. 

The way James watches him, without mockery or malice, is almost worse yet. For a terrible second, Francis is half-afraid that Fitzjames might say something, might clear his throat and offer some pitying bit of sympathy. His skin is hot and fury bites at him, knowing what Fitzjames has overheard. He wants to push him, to shove him. Throw him overboard. Keelhaul the man and leave him for the Devil and the deep blue sea. As if by blotting out the witnesses to his embarrassment, he might blot it out entirely. He knows the sound of James' laugh, hot and high, and tonight, he knows his own name will be kept for the larder, trotted out to fuel the fire. He wonders who will laugh with Fitzjames. He wonders what they will say. 

Fitzjames opens his mouth. 

Francis doesn't look back.

* * *

_"You know what men are like when they are desperate,"_ Francis had said once. _"We both do."_

At the end of the day, your heart isn't weighed against the uniform you wear. 

He is going to desert. If Franklin will not send a party for rescue, Francis will lead one himself.

Each word Francis scrawls onto the paper is more damning than the last. Six men lost. Franklin's alarm bell might not be ringing but Francis' own is. He has seen enough graves dug on this expedition, he'll suffer no more. They're running low on coffins in the hold. It's surreal to consider now. Francis wonders about the meeting where this had been discussed. How many men were to be expected to die? In the abstract warmth of an Admiralty room, lives were only numbers. Nameless and cold. No one has to bury a name. No one has to sew a number up in sailcloth and drop it overboard. You do not need to look a statistic in the eye while you close their mouth. Barrow had weighed death against the glory of Britain and found an acceptable number. 

Francis is very tired. He wonders how long the list is. If there's a service prewritten for him back in London, something he'll never hear. Strange how the kindest things ever said about us are not meant for our ears.

He puts the pen down, wondering if something's been written for Fitzjames too. 

Inhale. Look up, at the sun hounding you through the windows. Remember the promises you made. How you put your hat on, Francis, promising your sisters that you would be careful. Remember how you kissed your mother and swore to come back to her safe and sound. Remember how you gave Sophia a promise, _I'll keep him safe, I'll show you what I mean._ Remember how you had shaken Ross' hand and swore to be cautious, that you would bring back stories for the future.

I would swear to you that the future is ours. But that would be a lie. Francis knows the ice is a trap closed about their ankles, some skin and bones will need to be left behind. Sign on the dotted line, sign yourself away. Give your future up. Sign it over to someone else. 

He thinks of dark hair and dark eyes and buries his face in the palm of his hand.

Tell me how you came to the end of the world. Tell me how it all fell apart. What is the next surfacing of memory? He can still taste his childhood on the back of his tongue. “They’ve agreed to take him,” his father had announced, folding a letter in his lap. He had worn a pleased expression on his round face. It had been April or May. 1810.

“Oh, George,” his mother said, frowning. She always bit her lip when she was uneasy; Francis would later acquire this habit for his own. “He’s only thirteen.”

“Plenty old enough.”

“He's still my boy." Francis, the eleventh of thirteen and the second-youngest son, had been a quiet child. He said nothing then and still keeps his mouth shut. He would find later, as he does now, that the world has a way of happening to him whether he likes it or not. 

His mother had lit the lamp and sighed, settling on the sofa. Francis had often crawled up on the sofa when he was a child. He remembers now how he would sit next to her and set his head against her heart. She'd card her hands through his hair and recite chapter and verse to him, as if God could be learned by osmosis, passed on from her heart to his own. He had been stocky as a boy, his hair redder then. He had stood near the window as his father had spoken, one hand held behind his back, watching Church Street in the falling night. He had never been away from Banbridge for long, he wondered then if he would miss it. It's hard to tell the space of something in your heart until it's gone. (It turned out that he would miss it. Yet, when Francis would return later, visiting from year to year, Banbridge would not be the same. It would look the same, sound the same, but the faces would shift and the paint would peel. The grass was new and the shops had changed. A town is a living thing; you cannot always come back.)

"When shall he go?" His mother had asked quietly, her blue eyes darting from his father to his silent self at the window.

"He's to be aboard the _Hamadryad_ when it's to set sail on the twelfth of June. First-class volunteer serving Sir Thomas Staines." His father had looked at him, drunk on pride. "You'll look fine in a Royal Navy uniform. Won't you, lad?"

"Yes, sir," Francis had said. When he had later headed to bed, he took the stairs slowly. A long spiral staircase formed the nucleus of Avonmore House, a landing touching each floor. He had gone up the steps slowly, feeling as if he were nearing the end of something. The bottom of the glass, the diminishing pages at the end of a book. He had paused on each landing and looked at the floor, not entering the room. Already, he was set apart. 

His mother had come to pull the book from his hands and kiss him goodnight. "You will write to me," she had said. He had nodded and written to her faithfully until her death ten years later. A memory comes to him now, all these time later, of his cheek against his mother's shoulder and the scent of talcum powder in the air. Her soft voice reciting _"and, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of." And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not."_

 _This place? Even here, even now?_ Francis has never taken to religion much. He has more faith in a dip circle than a prayer. Still, he climbs the stairs to the upper deck, hoping both God and Éire are watching over him.

* * *

It happens very quick, having the world pulled out from under you. 

Hear it. The loose sledge on the ice. The crash, the shattered femur. The scream. The fall.

Silence.

Red blood on white snow. It's the most color he’s seen in years.

(What was the color of Sophia's dress? He's been trying to remember. Perhaps a little something like this red.)

* * *

_Sir John is lost. Entirely lost._

All over, all of it, in the space of a spare few minutes. Francis breathes hard, sitting at his table, blinking as if reality might right itself. "I never wanted anything as little as I want this now." He sighs, rubbing a hand over his ruddy face. He has wanted a command, but not like this. Not ever like this. Now here he is, left to ration the sacrifices they’ll make to this desolate place. His finger grazes the wound over his eye and Francis winces. 

It had happened quickly. Too quickly. He had just stepped upon deck when a cry was heard over the ice. “The spyglass,” he had said, reaching out with a hand still cramped from writing his resignation. He had held the spyglass to his eye without a second thought. Through the lens, he had watched the sled skid across the ice, gaining speed down the embankment. He had heard the cry as the sled hit Franklin in the back of the knees, crumpling him to the ground. It could have paused there, already a horror story, if God had been kind. But the ice is slick and offers no purchase and nothing of Bethel is found in this pale place. Francis tore the spyglass from his face, a bit of frozen skin going with it, the blood freezing the wound instantly closed. He had rushed forward, they all had. From the corner of his eye, he could see the men of _Erebus_ running, closer to the scene of the disaster. Fitzjames’ long dark greatcoat flapped around him as he ran, quick and lithe. 

Once more unto the breach.

The firehole is long and dark, a tunnel to a watery underworld. Fitzjames had crouched beside it, the stain of Franklin's blood beneath his knees. Francis looks at him now, at the dark trousers, wondering if the blood had seeped into his clothing. If it had been warm enough. Francis had stared, wild and bewildered, at the endless dark hole in the ground, opening before him like a hungry mouth. 

It had swallowed Franklin and the sled; Francis doubts that will be enough.

"I do have an order. Mr. Blanky, proceed immediately with the rescue party. Lieutenant Fairholme can lead it. Let him know."

"Sir John forbade this plan,” Fitzjames argues. His cheeks are wet and red, his brow harsh. 

"Swap two Marines into the party,” Francis continues, speaking to Blanky while eyeing James. “And lighten the load what amount you feel you safely can. They'll need every advantage." _It will be a long walk. I meant to go with you._

"I _implore you_ ,” Fitzjames begs. “Please, stop. We have lost Sir John! We have lost Sir John. Do you not -“ His voice breaks. His body rattles. “Do you not feel what has happened?" Fitzjames asks, bent and shaking in his seat. Francis stares at him, too exhausted to lecture himself into looking away. The polish seems stripped from the other man suddenly. His dark curls are damp and wild about his face, his skin flushed and mottled with grief. Francis knows his own eyes are rimmed and red, that tiredness covers him with its coat too. _Do I not feel it? How dare you even ask such a bloody question._ (As if Francis were nothing human. Not even a man with half a heart.) 

“I feel it,” he says, softer than he’d intended. Perhaps he would have been rougher if Fitzjames had sneered, if he had not had a hair out of place, if his hands did not grip at his own knees with a white-knuckled grasp, surely to leave bruises on his own skin. But misery has left a sweaty sheen on Fitzjames’ brow and his eyes are wet. For a brief moment, Francis wonders if he has ever met this man before. For a brief moment, he doesn’t bite back. 

"One day. I am asking one day," Fitzjames begs, hollow-voiced. "To allow our men to grieve."

This face, Francis has never seen the lines of his cheeks before. Never noticed the worry etched in the corners of his mouth. Instead of the storyteller of only a night ago, Francis can see only the way Fitzjames had glanced up from the firehole, dangling a rope to a hand that will never reach for it. He had caught Francis’ eye then, looking terrifyingly young and stilled with fear. 

Francis pauses before nodding. Hesitant and slow. "And then they go."

The meeting adjourns and the officers file out from the room. Fitzjames, red-eyed and damp-faced, takes the longest, unsteady as he rises to his feet.

"James," Francis says. Even through the surreal day, he can feel the memory of an impossible night. Had it only been last week that they had held a ball in _Erebus_ ' fo'c'sle? Has it been less than seven days that they had been ushered out to dance like fools before the entire crew? Francis still remembers the heat in his own face, how his damnable, whiskey-soaked fingers had shaken as he'd done up James' loose ribbon. 

James stares at him. The summer light gleams brightly through the windowpanes, an affront to their personal horror. His eyes, James' eyes, are not as dark as Francis had once believed. Shining wetly in the light, Francis can see the full hazel. The flecks of gold and green, the dark brown rims. He looks away. “What do you want from me?” Fitzjames hisses. “I have lost - we have lost - “ He pauses, breathing heavily, collecting himself. “Spare me an hour to mourn, Francis. You can give that much."

"You are not alone in this. Your grief." He thinks of trying to offer something. An embrace, a hand on the shoulder. Any sort of comfort. But the distance is too much. Even these few feet across the floorboards seem impossible. 

Yet, this is an impossible situation in an impossible place. He'll give the crews extra grog tonight. And tomorrow too.

James looks at him again and something shifts strangely. He watches how James swallows, the dance of his throat beneath his tie and stock. His hands twitch, empty and starved, wanting to reach out and feel the topography of that neck beneath his own touch. Have you ever paid attention to magnets? Look at him, a thousand metal shavings, useless fragments scattered everywhere like stars, all suddenly aligned in one direction. The terrifying realization that he could love and wouldn't even have to try.

But not here. This is not the place, this is not the time. There's nowhere to keep warm in the great white nothing. Not when the snow blinds you, not when the ice is slick beneath your feet. Not when all you have is your heartbeat and your name, stringing the both of them along behind you. 

"Thank you," James says at long last. He wipes a hand across his face, walking to the window and staring blindly outward. 

"Stay," Francis says. He doesn't know where it comes from. James glances at him with a look of equal surprise. "It's not a time to be alone."

"Francis, I'm quite fine on - "

"Not only for yourself," Francis says. "Do you truly think I feel nothing?"

James shakes his head. 

"Fetch the bottle from the sideboard, will you? Two glasses." 

He pours three fingers for the both of them. James holds his tumbler in his lap, swirling the brown liquid in the glass, a study in melancholy. At length, he speaks. His voice is quiet. "The sledge party tomorrow - " Francis bristles for a fight. James continues. "Do you think they can get there? Get us out of all this?"

"I don't know."

James nods slowly. He looks up again, his brown eyes strange. "The Passage is lost to us, isn't it, Francis?"

A pause. He knows James knows. He knows also that it needs to be said aloud. That innocence cannot die alone, marked with only silence. "Yes. I must fear it is."

"And to leave. We’ll not sail out of here either.” James looks so young. It's hard to reconcile his pale face with the man who had sat across from Francis at the dinner table, all roast duck and cherry bullets. Thirty-three, if Francis remembers the roster. Christ had died at thirty-three, run through at the side. Holes punched in his skin. 

Francis shakes his head. "No, I cannot see how we might. If we are to winter over here again, the damned ice will build back up. The pressure will warp the beams and crush the hulls." He doesn't mention the way _Terror's_ floor is already tilted. Any boot worth its tread knows the truth. "James," he says quietly, leaning forward and resting a hand on the table. "We are not to give up. We will find a way. There is time." _Trust me,_ he wants to say. _I will find a ladder for us both._

 _And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back into this land; for I will not leave thee._ (His mother’s voice, still clear and strong in his memory, after all these years. He hears her again. _Is fhearr fheuchainn na bhith san duil._ It is better to try than to hope. They will try.) He looks at his hands, spread out over the oak table. They look like his father’s. Clammy, too easily damp, just like his father’s. No one writes love stories about hands like his. Stained (but they are clean). The nails impossibly short, bitten to the quick, the cuticles a ruin. No, there are no romances with hangnails. 

Silence lingers. They drink and the hour passes. When the glasses run dry, they pour more. "Do you know why I came?" James asks with a broken laugh. "I wanted - hoped - to make a name for myself. Something to be remembered. I wanted to be the first back with the news of our success. Now, look at us." James shakes his head, looking over. “Why are you here, Francis? Why did you come?"

A question we ask every soldier, every sailor, everyone in a uniform and dead on the ground. Why are you here? As if the answer is ever anything but the same.

_Because they sent me._


	6. Chapter 6

_July 1842  
_ _HMS Cornwallis_

The rockets never cease. The cries never stop. 

Even if he covers his face with the woolen blanket, the sounds of gunfire and the burning scent of flesh and hair peek through. Roast duck, he thinks. Roast pork. It doesn't matter who you are or where you came from, the smell of burning flesh is all the same. Turn the spit, trim the fat. Get your fork out, get your knife ready. He’s sick on the smell of it. Blood and sulfur. The tang of black vinegar. Salt.

Always salt.

His blankets are stifling in the summer heat. The _Cornwallis_ is anchored in the Yangtze River with Chinkiang just beyond. Outside, a city of a half-million living souls burns, trapped between their own thick brick walls. He'd stood atop one of them as he'd been shot, thirty-five feet high, looking out over the city. Over the ferns and the trees, ginkgo and golden larch. Strange how the earth doesn't notice a battlefield. The sky had stayed blue, the birds had still sung. The sun had still moved in its lazy, steady path above him, the shadows shifting on the hills in exactly the same fashion they had done since time immaterial. The shadows had been like this before him; they would be like this after. Strange how the Earth takes no notice of us unless we force it to.

His dark hair sticks to his face. Sometimes he thinks about praying. His aunt had wanted him to be a priest. Sometimes priests might burn but they're rarely shot.

Too late.

There is a hole in his arm. His back. James moves gingerly, trying not to pull at his bandages. How bad will the scars be? It's hard to say. There are holes in him, perforating his body. He's choking on the smell of the dead. Someday he'll try to make sense of it all, try to wrap it up in the comforting structure of a story. Give each man a good death and a reason too. That’s the kindness of stories; they do the dirty cleanup work. 

"You're a hero," an officer said. 

How many men do you have to kill to be a hero?

“How will they heal?” He had asked the doctor, Stephen Stanley, after he’d fished the bullet from his back, where it was seducing his spine. The pain of having a scalpel in his side had been worse than the gunshot itself. James had held a piece of leather between his biting teeth and drank gin till the sky swam. Still, his screams could be heard for miles. 

"It will leave a mark," the doctor had said, washing the blood off his hands. He's got a smile tighter than the lid on a sober man's bottle. The water in the washbasin is red. 

"How bad?"

Wait and see. It’ll be a story for you. You can use it as an illustration. Line everyone up and charge admission. Later, he would polish the rough edges. Remove his own fear, the shaking hand he’d pressed to the open wound, the strands of broken blue wool he’d picked from torn flesh. Later, he wouldn’t speak of the cut of the surgeon’s instruments into his body, how gin is loud enough to drown everything but that. _I thought of Nelson,_ he would say, _I might have ended, same as he._ But James would leave out the key parts, how on one July day in 1842, he had been shot by a single musket ball, the size of a cherry, and had lain bleeding out on an unforgiving brick wall with no one to beg for a kiss.

No one is a blank page. We go through life writing down our hurts on our skin and save none of the kindness. No wonder it’s easier to remember pain. Our bodies mark it down, make a record of it. When he will peel his clothes off in the future, there will be nowhere on his skin to point to and say _look here, this is where I was loved._ Love isn't what we take with us, not unless we shepherd it carefully. Not unless we make a point of it.

There are always holes in our bodies. The trick is to keep the lid on. 

The trick is to not bleed out.

* * *

_July 1847  
_ _HMS Erebus_

  
  


“Gentlemen, something smells of fresh meat." James wrinkles his brow, stepping nearer the stove where two able-bodieds sit crouched, playing cards spread out over the table, and picking at something on a stick. 

“Aye, captain," one says, blinking up at him. "Nothin’ stolen, save from ol’ Fagin, I suppose.”

It has been two full years since they had slaughtered their last oxen at Disko Bay. The meat had been salted in barrels and stored for rations. Nothing fresh has graced a man’s tongue in the last two years. Nothing but salt and porridge, aging chocolate and dry biscuits. The weevils perhaps. Yes, he supposes the weevils are fresh. James’ nostrils twitch, sick on the smell of roast meat. He looks at the little spit and fire, the plucked and cooked rat held out like a drumstick. Plucked and charred the edges, once cooked, a rat is nearly indistinguishable from a chicken leg. He coughs to hide his surprise, half-imagining the beast on one of _Erebus_ ' willow-patterned china plates, knife and fork set out for the carving.

James frowns, turning the spit in his hand.

“Vermin, Captain. But meat’s meat, ain’t it?”

James looks from the roasted rat to the able-bodied seaman’s anxious face and back again. The genteel gentleman in him would scorn this, pass censure and punishment. But is there anything in the Articles about eating rats? The Admiralty has thought to prescribe everything but this is somewhere beyond the Articles and bylaws, somewhere well off the map. Supplies are dwindling, a large portion have gone sour and been poured down the firehole. They have not yet reduced rations, not yet, but it is July and still no sign of a thaw. He isn't fool enough to believe that a reckoning does not wait for he and Captain Crozier alike. 

In May, he had wanted to believe in Sir John’s optimism. In May, he had counted on a thaw and waited to hold the Passage in his hands. Strange how quickly that can change. _We’ll not be out this year. Even if the leads open in spring, we’ll have lived the winter on half-meals and nearly run out of coal to burn._ He nods, handing the spit-roasted rat back and pressing his mouth thin. “Carry on,” he mutters to the seaman.

The sick scent of roast meat in the air lingers, the sick feeling of dread too. 

Once the bread’s gone, what kind of circuses might they offer? 

James walks the decks of _Erebus,_ checking the crew's nails and hair length, taking notes on provisions and habits, same as he has always done. A month ago, he had not been alone. A month ago, he might have paused in the engine room and run his fingers along the locomotive engine, saying _all the power in the world isn’t a match for a good wind and a fine set of sails. The Euphrates was a steamer, if you remember. When I sailed with Chesney, she broke down in the middle of the river, and we had to abandon her for naught. Had we a sail and wind to boot, well -_ Yes, he might have said that. But now he says nothing. Speaks nothing. The tale dead as a doornail in his mouth. Grimly, he imagines walking with Francis, wondering how quickly that sour frown would fix upon him. 

"Captain, I have a report," someone says. It takes a heartbeat for him to realize who the lieutenant is speaking to.

I will not explain grief to you. You have either met grief or you have not. Nothing is the same shape, nothing is the same color. Once, James had thought grief to be very loud and dark. But the sky is white today. The hours are the same. His face is the same. The sun is bright the next day and the stock made on Tuesday is still there for tonight’s dinner. Everyone gets a little more, that’s all. One less mouth to feed. 

Someone asks: _Are you okay?_

There’s no answer to that question. He can’t even remember who asked.

We have a habit of comparing our narrow escapes to our losses, wondering how we’ve fared. James can feel the taut pull of the scar on his side. How much can we be torn apart and still be put back together? Lose an arm, lose a leg, leave a little of yourself everywhere you go. We don’t think about the hair left on pillows, the skin cells made into dust. We don’t think about the little bit of blood that we pour out over and over and over again, staining the carpets and the drapes. We cut ourselves on the sharp edges of our lives and say sorry about the mess. I am asking you about grief. Don’t tell me how to look at it. _We have lost Sir John._

He writes his journal entries in the Great Cabin now, taking advantage of the light. This journal had begun as a promise to keep a diary for his family, yet he has an eerie feeling that they will never read these words. He does not know who he is writing to. Himself? Someone else? Who are you out there, left alone with these scraps I’ve left behind? 

He puts the pen between his lips, tasting metal.

_We have lost Sir John and Lieutenant Gore. I feel as if there is something important I should say to mark the day yet my head is a bloody fog. Francis led the service and I suppose that is to be the way we go on, Francis at the front of our party. I am afraid - No, that is the truth of it. I fear our innocence was lost along with Sir John down that firehole. Francis has warned us from the start of this pack ice. Of this desolate place. I have only begun to fear that he may have been right all along. I'm at a loss to determine how we might yet come out of this scrape._

James huffs a dry laugh at the idea of admitting to Francis that he may have been correct. _You’d never let me hear the end of it, you insufferable bastard._ Yet, he pauses with the pen still half in his mouth, remembering the faint kindness Francis had offered him in the bottom of a bottle. _Now is not the time to be alone,_ Francis had said. 

This journal. These letters to no one. James leafs through the pages, ears burning when confronted with his own lost hope. These words are the only true artifacts of who he had been before they had come here. In a sense, he has lost himself too. Histories ache. James is quiet during services, listening to the genealogies of Noah and Christ with the sort of grudge only an orphan could bear. He stares at his hand, cramped with cold around his pen, and wonders how long Prometheus had clung to his rockface before realizing no one was coming back? 

A knock disturbs him.

"Come in."

His steward, John Bridgens, enters with James' boots in one hand and an apologetic smile in the other. James pushes back from his desk with a sigh. Dinner. His stomach growls but he isn't hungry. Perhaps it had been the rat smell. 

“It will be over before you know it, sir,” Bridgens says, helping him into his slops. 

“It’s not a _hardship,_ of course."

“Of course, sir, these are unusual times. And you are an unusual man. Come, there are three courses tonight and a dessert. I’ll have a brandy and Kipling waiting for you on your return.”

“Bridgens,” James says warmly, taking comfort in his steward’s steadiness when he cannot find it in himself. “You are a bloody treasure, I swear to it.”

Dinners have been strange since Sir John’s death. James takes his time in walking the half-mile to _Terror_ , snow falling heavy and thick in his face. The sun is relentless and he squints into it. It will not set today. It will not set for weeks. 

He swallows slowly, breathes in deep, and boards _Terror._

“Welcome aboard, sir,” a lieutenant greets him. Neptune, a shaggy Newfoundland, rushes to him and James crouches to scratch him behind the ears. When he stands, he finds Francis hovering in the door of the Great Cabin, watching him with bleak eyes. Without thinking, he reaches to fix his stray curls. The lines are deep under Francis' eyes and grow darker with each passing month. James knows they're reflected in his own face. Sleep does not come easily and it doesn't stay long. Nights in the ice are worse than the days. He dreams of looking below the ocean deep. You should not peel back the water. Like skin from a body, flaying the earth clean and laying bare her bones. What had he expected but death? He closes his eyes and there is a face in the water. Frozen, half-consumed by fish. The eyes plucked out. Fish food. Whale food. Sea rot. There hadn't been enough oxygen to scream, not down below water. That's the trouble with water, the damning silence. 

It's terribly quiet on _Erebus_ now. The shape of Sir John lingers in every shadow, the silence screams. Each day, another choked back story, another swallowed aside. He had been a storyteller once, a performer. What is left of the man with something to prove when there is no one to prove it to? Who are you when you are left alone? 

Francis' face looks very grey in the strange light through the illuminators. Strange and forbidding. _Tell me a story,_ James wants to say. _You’ve spent ten years in this miserable Arctic, tell me how it was supposed to go._ He looks at his white knuckles and Francis’ red cheeks, trying to remember the way they had looked when there had been enough warmth to go around. Now warmth is a too-small blanket, something’s always left out in the cold. 

"Hello, Francis," James says, unable to name a single emotion that plays across Francis' freckled face. 

* * *

Willow-patterned china. James pushes the salt beef and pease around on his plate, his fingers half-blue in the cold. The sick-sweet smell of barbecued rat hasn't left him. How will he tell this story? Later? Franklin had made a feast of how he had chewed his own boots. Somehow, this feels different. He doesn't know if there's a story to be had here. 

At least, it's not something to tell over dinner.

 _Don't know why we bothered salting the meat, the ice would have kept it well enough._ They could have used the pack as an icebox, cooked the slaughtered oxen over a fire. At least it would have tasted fresh. Clean. At least he might have swallowed something without salt. When was the last time his fingers were not puffy with salt? He can't remember. 

Dinner is quiet and James, despite protesting his walk over, finds himself lingering after. The wardroom is silent but for the two of them. James leans forward on the table, steepling his fingers. Francis slouches in a chair next to him, his voice as wet and sloshed as the whiskey in his glass. James hates when he drinks. He hates the cruel flint of Francis’ voice, the contempt in the curl of his mouth. He hates the red starbursts of broken blood vessels that scatter across the other man’s face and the unfocused glassiness of his eyes. He loathes the unkempt look of his hair, the rumples in his coat. His breath is sour. His words slurred. Most of all, James hates that he lingers near Francis, listening for any thread of who he might be beneath it all.

“We’re nearly as low on whiskey as we are on tea and sugar,” James observes drily. “What’s your second-best poison? Gin?”

Francis grimaces. “Rather that I’d hang from the damned mast than pickle myself with that swill. My father drank gin.”

Curiosity killed the cat and the commander both. Or captain, as he might be now, James realizes, the weight of _Erebus_ ’ command unsettling in his belly. Still, he leans forward. Francis rarely speaks of his past. He doesn’t want to spill a drop. 

“I imagine Crozier the Elder was a fine naval man as well?” _An officer? Just as severe and unpleasant as his son?_ James has an image of a broad-faced man in blue wool and epaulets. He has never been to the north of Ireland but imagines that same cacophony of green stretches upward. Francis, perhaps the oldest son, looking stern and steady against a parcel of brothers and sisters. 

A sharp laugh. A shake of the head. “Hardly,” Francis mutters. James raises an eyebrow. “He was a lawyer. A bloody great prick of a lawyer. Gin on every day but Sunday. As if the Lord only checks once a week. He died a few years back. Just before we left Greenhithe.”

Without asking, James remembers sitting in Franklin’s parlor, furious about Captain Crozier’s delay in meeting with the expedition. _If he doesn’t arrive soon, I’ll have to outfit Terror myself. Serve him right to pack the dullards aboard, if he cannot do us the decency of even being a part of the preparations._

 _All in good time,_ Franklin had said with infuriating serenity. _Francis has had a pressing personal matter to attend to. I understand he’s to sail from Dublin next week and meet us then. The ships will be staffed and stocked, James. Nothing to worry about._

“I am sorry to hear it.”

"He was a danger, my father was," Francis murmurs, shrugging the condolences off and leaning back in his chair. "He'd pick out all the girls he liked, tell me to go after them."

James laughs, trying to imagine a teenaged Francis. Strawberry-blond and freckled, blushing in the sun. He wonders if Francis' midshipman uniform had fit as poorly as James' own had. His arms and legs had grown twice as fast as the rest of him, leaving him gangly and strange. 

"And did you? Did the strapping young Francis Crozier go after them?"

The mirth grows quiet. Francis has a strange look in his eye, one that James cannot quite place. "No," Francis says finally. "I did not."

He nods, running one finger up and down his glass, thinking of the past. Homesickness creeps in when you're not looking and settles when you're starving. It's never what you expect. He misses the smell of the hay in the barns of Rose Hill. The way the sunlight had played over the blue and white tile of the kitchen. The grassy flavor of the hen's eggs and fresh milk. He misses warmth and laughter, sunlight and joy. The village had held celebrations for Bonfire Night each November and James tries to recall the heat on his skin, the play of cool autumn air against flame. The fire had licked up against the night sky and he'd watched it feast on the pyre like tucking into a meal. The fire had gone with him, here and there. James in his hammock, James in his bunk, one hand between his legs and remembering the heat, how it might be with another body against him. His eyes closed and lips tightly pressed, every sailor is a master in the art of silence. How to come without a noise, how to come without the lights on. He would imagine the ship catching fire, how he might be tangled up in his own hammock, the fire crawling over the deck like a hungry lover, licking at his boots. It would burn him clean, wash all his sins away with a burning mouth. He would come on his own furious hand, dreaming of heat. 

After, he would be cold again. The smell of the ship would creep back in. Sweat and salt, tar and musty wool. He would clean his hand off with his handkerchief, looking around. 

There are men that would reach for him. Every midshipman knows the gleam of a certain sort of eye, a captain who'll press a gun to your skin to see how firm it is. A lieutenant who'll run his hands down your back, just to check the set of your spine. Don't eat where you fuck, someone had said to him once. So James never takes from the ship's larders. He waits for each port, slipping out quietly, finding a molly house or two and someone who doesn't ask for his name.

What is it like to reach for someone twice, to learn a lover as well as a favorite book? 

He doesn't know.

A question floats in his mind like flotsam. Just as trash, just as useless. He can't seem to throw it away. When his gaze catches Francis’s own, he holds it. 

"You never talk about Miss Cracroft."

Francis swallows. "No."

"Why not?"

"She is my private concern. It is not for you to know."

 _Isn't it? T_ hough he cannot explain why the thought comes to him. Instead, he swallows and tightens his jaw. This time he is the first to look away. _If we had met in another time and another place, how might it have gone?_ The faint red in Francis’s pale hair glimmers in the lamplight and somewhere in his laughter is the sound of church bells. There’s a flinch. A wretched twitch. James has traveled too long with Francis to not recognize the small tells, the little betrayals of a flickering eyelid, a tension in the jaw. Francis, as per usual, says nothing. 

They’re just colleagues. James knows what he is, an inconvenience barely tolerated. There are moments when it might be something else. Something new. James holds his memories up to the light, squinting to see if he can peek through the envelope, if he can find invisible ink. Two years since meeting Francis. Two years of strange silences and sudden smiles. Two long years of something he cannot name.

" It feels like an omen," Francis muses, slurring a little. 

James nods. He had stood quietly behind Francis during the funeral, his eyes cast down. Two men to mourn and not a bone to bury; the ice had done that work for them. The casket is empty. Francis' voice had shaken at the edges. Why had the world felt colder and sudden? Why had his jaw clenched tight, his blood run cold? _This place wants us dead,_ Francis had said once. (A memory: the crack of a fist upon a heavy oak table, the upset of porcelain. The spill of black tea over maps and reports, the warm feeling of hot tea upon his hand, soaking his right sleeve.) _There be no melodramas here. Only live men. Or dead men._ It had seemed unreal and unlikely then. James had swallowed during the service, closing his eyes in the impression of prayer. He counted the beat of the seconds. Make it long enough. Make it look real. Mostly he watched Francis. The captain had worn a grave expression, his face lifted toward the white sky. A captain at war. A captain readying his men for battle in the morning. _Into the valley of Death rode the one-hundred and thirty._

Francis spills more whiskey into his glass. The sharp rye scent fills the room.

"With all you're shouldering," James ventures, gesturing at the whiskey. "Perhaps you should - you should curb that for now."

"Does one not bring one's habits to _Terror_?"

Francis' blue eyes slide to him, dull and thick with drink. An odd smile curls his mouth, something half-there, vacant and nearly cruel. _I've missed something._ He doesn't know what. He stares at the ruddy cheeks, Francis' clammy skin, trying to imagine this same man in this same wardroom, five years ago and eleven-thousand miles south. Nothing matches, nothing adds up. 

" _Why are you here,_ Francis? You've never believed in this cause. No one was ordered to this. We volunteered. _You_ volunteered."

Francis quirks a brow. "I was, in fact, ordered."

"By whom? Not by the Admiralty. You were never Barrow's choice." Said and regretted, all in one fell swoop. Yet, for once, Francis doesn't rise to the bait. He holds the glass near his mouth and stares off to a corner of the room.

"Keep Sir John safe and ensure his judgment," Francis mutters. "Those were my orders. It's what she asked me to do."

"Lady Jane?"

"No. I don't owe her a bloody thing. Sophia."

"Miss Cracroft? Miss Cracroft, who rejected you? Twice, as I heard it." 

James has met Sophia Cracroft twice. He remembers her well enough. Slender-shouldered and pale-haired, keeping close to Lady Jane's side. Mostly, he remembers how Sir John would pace the Great Cabin, his face downturned, musing on Francis and Sophia. His near escape and how Francis must hate him for it. 

His stomach turns. For once, it isn't the rat. 

"You discussed this?" Francis asks slowly, setting the glass down and looking to him.

"Yes. Sir John discussed it with me. Well, he... Actually, he regretted how it had happened." He breathes in. "Francis, he was burdened by it."

"Burdened by the thought of a third attempt, no doubt."

"That's why you're here. Good Christ, Francis."

"Keep your pity," Francis growls, rising from the table. "You're going to need all the pity you have for what's coming." He walks toward the door, eyes red with drink and a stumble in his legs. 

"Francis," James says as Francis reaches the door. Francis pauses, on hand on the knob. He doesn't turn around. James can read enough of him from the back. The bend of his head, the slump of his sloped shoulders. The shake of his hands. There is ruin here. And there is fear. "What's coming?"

Silence, then a sigh. "Don't ask me that."

"Please."

Francis turns but doesn't look up. "Ruin is coming. Starvation. Scurvy. Illness. Exposure. Perhaps only words now, ugly words, but - it'll be more than words that come for us in a year." When Francis finally looks at him over his shoulder, his pale eyes are more steady than James had expected. Darker too. His mouth is open, breathing heavily through his chapped lips. "I should have fought," Francis whispers, his voice haunted. "I knew what might be."

 _He was right. Christ. Francis was right._ He thinks of the mate who had fallen in the water, two years ago now. The boy who had coughed up blood and died in sickbay. How is it possible to cease existing? What animates us? How does a body fall apart in the water? Is it the flesh first - bloated and pale? The lips purple, the skin begins to peel away from bone, calcification. The mouth opens, that great scream of nothingness. On the seafloor, in the sand, the vampire squids and carpet sharks come to eat the cheeks, the sweetest of all, and nudge the joints. Disarticulation. You are out of place and out of time. After death, do you still watch until your eyes are swallowed by eels? Do you see the inside of the belly of the beast? He doesn't know. He doesn't want to find out. James looks up at the white sky. The white expanse of pack ice and snow. Nothing interrupts the white save the black marks of _Terror_ and _Erebus_ , their masts scraping the clouds. For the first time, there is nothing of possibility. He knows what they are. He knows where they are. In the center of their own white tomb. 

"It was Sir John's choice not to turn back," James says, standing. "Our current situation is - well, the blame does not lie at _your_ door."

"Carve that on my gravestone, why don't you?" Francis spits. "Better yet, carve it on all of ours." 

James moves toward Francis, one slender-fingered hand finding its way to Francis' shoulder, resting gently. He looks at his own hand as if it were not his own. A month ago he would not have thought to reach out. But a month ago, Sir John would have sat at the head of the table and hope would still be stuck between his teeth. A month ago, they had been British sailors. Now, now he doesn't know what they are. This place, this empty place. White and spare, he's lived here for two years now. Things have changed. 

"Please," Francis whispers, his back still to James. From the slight angle, James can see how Francis' eyes are screwed tightly shut. _Please, what?_ He doesn't know what Francis means. Doesn't wish to ask. 

"Get some rest. It will look brighter in the morning, all will be well." He doesn't believe his own words. They, neither of them, do. "I'll be over in the morning for the magnetic readings. Do you hear me, Francis? All will be well." 

A tight nod, a quirk of the mouth. When Francis leaves, shutting the door behind him, James stands in place for a long minute, opening and closing his hand. Warm. He has half-forgotten warmth. As warm if he had placed it near a bonfire. 

He rubs a hand over the ache in his side, feeling the familiar pucker of an ancient bulletwound under layers of cotton and wool. Shot like Nelson at Trafalgar. It makes a pretty tale. James on the gentle battleground, pierced through like Saint Sebastian. Like all stories, it's about how you tell it. What you show, what you conceal. He had cried out horribly, convulsed in terror, his hands desperate to push pressure against himself. The blood had come fast and thick and still, still, still through it all he could only smell seared flesh and burnt wood. Blood comes in pulsing waves, heartbeat after heartbeat, spilling him out on the ground. He had held his own death in his hands and looked for someone, anyone, to call to. He would die alone in the center of a town he did not know. He would die here, thinking of Nelson's last words. _Kiss me, Hardy,_ Nelson had said. In his last, reaching for comfort. James has never been loved. Never been kissed in love. 

He had thought that was his end, unkissed and with no one around to ask. Strange, five years later, here he is again; John Bull's sent him out to his death untouched. The light from the illuminators beams down on him, casting the room in a sickly, whitewashed glow. 

Where it touches his skin, it almost looks like white fire.


	7. Chapter 7

_September 1842  
_ _Falkland Islands_

The wind is picking up. Clouds thin and bare against the grey winter sky.

“Blowing north, northeast," Ross says, frowning at the window. "We’ll have to adjust our course."

“I’ve already accounted for it.”

“Of course you have,” Ross grins. “I don’t know why I doubted. I’ll never be your match. It’s funny, isn’t it, tell someone you’re a sailor and they think it’s all water. But, really -“

“It’s more of a mastery of the winds.”

“Yes, exactly. Wind husbandry. A good captain knows how to ride a wild wind and change course in a moment, no matter how it blows.”

“Or doesn’t blow.”

“Yes, that too. Can’t say any of us haven’t done our time in the doldrums.”

“To sail,” Francis says absently, twisting his hand around a glass of whiskey. “Is really to keep two mistresses, the wind and sea alike. The fair wind and the fair current. Love them both and you’ve yourself a happy ship.”

"Listen to that. You're a damned poet, Francis." 

"And you're a damned liar." 

Ross laughs. "Can you imagine living here? One ship to port a year, cut off from the rest of the world? It's all well and good to strike into the ice and visit but - "

"Never confuse tourism with immigration?" Francis asks, an amused brow raising. 

"Just the thing." 

Francis nods, absentmindedly running a finger over the lace tablecloth. Irish lace. A scrap of home in a faraway place. The islands are pasture and morass. In the summer, the grasses are dotted with the flowers of fachine and native box. The white petals too of the pale maiden, a white lily seen nowhere else. Francis sketches these in his notebook, carefully labeling each species, wondering if they've ever borne a name before.

The Falklands have a strange appeal to him. Isolated off the Patagonian coast, a natural wintering place for Antarctic exploration. The islands seem another world entirely. No trees grow. Until the French had established a colony at Port St. Louis in 1764, no one lived here. An earth without men. It takes a certain sort of creature to survive in a land that never wanted you.

Francis is good at this, asking somewhere to make room for him.

"I suppose there's some fair appeal to carving out a life with no one to answer to." Vaguely, he remembers another place and another time. Freckle-faced Francis had been all of eighteen years old when his ship, the HMS _Briton_ , had tripped upon the edge of Pitcairn Island and found John Adams and his self-made life on sand and shore. "For all that it might lack in comforts. Supposing I do have half a mind to keep sheep and penguins in my old age, I'll charge you to come visit once and again."

Ross laughs. "Forty-six, Francis. You're only forty-six. I'll not let you retire just yet."

"That's rich from you, did Ann not ask you to hang up your own cap?"

"Well, that's different," Ross says. He draws circles on the table, wider and smaller again, folding his index and middle finger to trace them like a sextant. “Did you love her?”

Sophia again.

“I might," Francis murmurs, not looking at him. He focuses on the pattern of the lace instead. "I could.”

“When you love someone,” Ross says, shining with the thought of Ann Coulman, “Truly. I think you can’t help but say it. It just - comes out. There's no way to stop it.”

Francis nods and says nothing.

He's used to saying nothing.  
  


* * *

_November 1847  
_ _HMS Terror_

  
  


He wakes. It's early. 

Around him, the hull of the ship creaks. What time is it? Near four in the morning. No light yet, not for hours. Winter light comes late and leaves early. Exhaustion haunts his bones and the bags under his eyes too. He only ever manages sleep for an hour or two before waking, still tired, in his dark room. He fluffs the useless pillow, a miserable flat thing. He blames the weather, the lumps of the mattress. He blames the position of the stars and the tasteless meat at dinner. It doesn’t matter. Blame can settle anywhere, into any bones and any depths. Still, he does not sleep. We always know when we are lying to ourselves. 

He wants a drink. It's too early. He rubs a hand over his face and tries to dig the sleep out from his eyes. His mouth feels like damp, fouled cotton. He's drooled on the pillow and it's cold beneath his skin. His dream still lingers on the edges of his memory, like an uncertain visitor fiddling with their hat and coat before leaving. Francis has nearly forgotten the woman he'd thought he'd seen in the shallows at Disko Bay. Her long tangled and matted hair, her sunken eyes, mouth half-open in a scream. 

_A baintsí._ Everyone knows the banshee's wail. His mother had brushed his hair and told him stories of the wailing women. They weep for deaths yet unknown. For family and lovers buried unbeknownst to you. For danger you might not survive. 

It's foolishness to press forward against the cries of the banshee. Yet, he's come all the same.

He gets up, joints aching with the effort. Francis knows all the superstitions. When he had been a child, his mother had tucked her worries in his pockets and wrapped her anxieties around his neck. What are superstitions but inherited fear? Never sleep with your head facing north. Never bury your dead on the north side of a church. Always wave at a magpie and never pick a comb up from the ground. Yes, he knows them all. The banshee unsettles him. The dream too. He'd dreamed of the Falklands again as well. It had been a quiet time, a good time. He and Ross, _Terror_ and _Erebus_ , wintering with the sheep and the penguins. He had been happy there.

"Keep yourself safe, Francis," Ross had said, hugging him at Greenhithe. He'd waved as the ships had departed with his hand in his wife's own. "Come back safe, do you hear me?"

Francis remembers.

 _I_ _ _m s_ orry, I’m so damned sorry. _ In his mind’s eye, for a moment, there is the fixed memory of Sir James Ross. The heart of an uneasy man comes along in fits and tangles, Francis has never named his emotions for his former captain. There had been the warmth and the want, there had been Francis in his own cot, his fist around his cock and dragging out a miserable orgasm with James’ name on his tongue. James Ross had married and Francis had gotten piss-drunk and woken up stinking of his own sick. He thinks of James Ross less often now. _What does that tell you about me? Can’t even keep faith with someone I didn’t have, let alone someone I might. Curse the godforsaken name, would that all Jameses have been drowned at birth._

"Why the Devil am I dreaming of the damned Falklands?" he mutters, splashing his face at the basin. 

The James in his dream had not had red hair. 

He had not had blue eyes. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


"I had not expected what I might miss." James leans in, his elbows planted on their spread of copperplate-engraved maps, somewhere over Lancaster Sound and Greenland. He toys with a sextant, spinning it on his long, icepick fingers. 

"What sorts of things?"

"I miss trees, Francis," James says with a half-laugh. "Always take them for granted, you know. They're always there, in the background and along the streets. Trees. Seasons. A dinner that doesn't come from a goddamn tin. Being fully warm. Birds. You don't hear birds here. There’s only the occasional flock or an albatross. I didn't notice the quiet at first but I would like to hear them again."

“Aye.”

“Go on, your turn," James says, leaning over the table. He glances at Francis, his nose as sharp as a trowel against the Great Cabin's dark oak paneling. He has an elegant look to him, something murderously beautiful and indulgent. Francis imagines him in other times, distant and past. A Roman senator, wrapped in white. A knight astride a dark horse, banner of his lover tucked within armor. Lancelot must have looked as James does. Or Galahad. Francis is certain of it. 

“Eggs,” Francis says. “Milk. A damned bed I might be able to roll over in and not hit my knee upon the wall.” 

“What would you do first, on your return?”

“A pint and a pie and then give Barrow a piece of my bloody mind, that’s what.” He pauses. “I’d go back home, I reckon.”

“Your family?”

“Nine brothers and sisters yet living,” Francis says. Home. A strange and distant word, home. Is not _Terror_ home, this place where he has rested his head more often in his adult life than not? Her hull an embrace, her creaking wood a voice. Still, we remember who we were once. Stuck in the ice, he remembers warmth and greenery. A road he might have walked down, a road that might have taken him anywhere. 

His name on the dotted line, selling his future off piecemeal, year by year. He has nothing else to offer, so he gave his years instead. His future. 

_How long, Barrow? How long will you wait after we don't return before you send another ship for the Passage? How long till you scrape the docks and the mining downs for third and fourth sons, promising porridge and shelter, a ticket out of town? How long will you let the ink dry on our obituaries before you use our names to sell the Passage again?_

He frowns as James twists the sextant, seeing his bare forearm in the lamplight. 

"What is it?" James asks.

"Your arm, you've a dark spot." Small, round, the size of a coin. He thinks of the buck's head his father had kept mounted in his study, dark brown fur against green wallpaper. The black eyes, shiny as glass, just the same size. 

"A bruise," James says. "Just a bruise. I bumped it on the corner of a table last week. It's nothing to worry about, Francis."

Francis presses his mouth into a thin line but does not argue.

James stares into the fire, tapping his foot restlessly. "I met a fellow once," he says. "A sailor from up and down the St. Lawrence, porting in the Great Lakes. I told him a fair few tales, ghost stories and the like, and asked if he had any to share from his travels." James pauses, running a finger over the rim of the glass. "He told me no, he had none, but that didn't mean there wasn't a horror. That the very lake itself _was_ the monster, the blasted very land."

"James." 

"Do you believe in God, Francis?"

"Once, yes. I did indeed." Francis quietly brushes an invisible fold from his trousers, his pocketwatch heavy against his skin. 

"The stars even seem to watch us now. Like sport."

"It's not so dire as all that."

James looks at him balefully. "It's a funny world, isn't it? You the optimist and I'm morbing on about nothing."

Francis frowns, glancing over. But James sips his sherry in silence and does not elaborate. One curl has a habit of falling in his eyes when he's tired, Francis has never noticed until now. His fingers twitch, wishing to whisk the drink away and to tuck the curl back. He cannot look James in the eye. It’s absurd, really. He’s done nothing wrong. Nothing. But hasn’t he? A little? The priests have always warned against sins of the heart and weaknesses of the mind. There’s no one here to confess to but the ice. How much of love is merely being in the right place at the right time? How often do lovers miss? Wrong place, wrong time, wrong sex, wrong name, wrong god, wrong language. 

With a start, Francis realizes where his mind has drifted. 

_Oh._

(Lust can be blamed on a dress, a drink, a laugh; love is inexcusable.)

Love. It should be a happy thought. Not all loves are born in joy. He lifts the sherry and downs the rest. What is love? How do we define it? How do we measure it, this shape within us of absence? The hole in my heart that you have plugged up, yes, that is love. _I hate you for it. I hate that I love you. That I need you. Go on then, make your way in the world. Pull yourself out of me like a stopper and let me bleed on out. Don’t look back._ Francis wonders about his own body, about his hollow-boned skeleton, as light as a bird’s. How much of him is filled with James now? How much of him is the ocean, how much of him is the sound of James Fitzjames' footsteps? Where did the rest of himself go? Consider displacement. He is cored out, scooped out. Where is the meat of him, the bitter heart? Francis looks at where his fellow captain sits silent, wondering if his heart is carried too. 

Francis glares. Nothing new there. 

“Are you well?” James asks, watching his expression shift.

“Just a pain in my head, nothing important.”

“Let Jopson fix up a headache powder. I’ll fetch him.”

“No.”

“If it pains you, you should - "

" _No_."

" _Francis_."

"You're out of bounds," Francis warns.

"Am I? For what? Being concerned for your well-being? For _trying_ to find some middle ground between us?"

"Middle ground? Who do you plan to impress with that great tale then? There's no Admiralty keeping watch here. Save your breath, there'll be no glittering medals in it."

James stares at him. His brow twitches. He stands quickly, the chair jostling backward, running a hand through his hair.

"This is what you think of me." 

Francis drinks, looking away. His anger catches like a wick. Lift the glass then, drink on up. It's easier if he keeps his mouth busy, easier if the world isn't so raw. "I try to not think of you," he mutters into the glass.

“I don’t get you, Francis,” James says, pausing in his pacing and turning to look. “Sometimes we’re nearly friends, or at least I think we are. And then we’re right back to this. You’re as bitter as a pill and won’t even look at me.”

The silence between them is as large as an ocean. There is space enough for them both and for the Holy Spirit too. James stares at him. His hair now wild as brambles, his eyes disbelieving and wide. Francis doesn't move. He stares back, waiting for the staccato fire of James' questions. For that is what they _do._ Give and take, bait and bite. Francis turns the fire up to high and James boils over. Something is different today. He holds his pen tightly, the metal pressing sharply into the pad of his hand. His eyes, blue as hypoxia, dig into James himself. The stillness beats on. The isochronal tick of a clock keeps time.

“I hate this,” James suddenly grits out, his jaw tense. 

“As do I." He hates a lot of things _._ He never mentions it. James breathes heavily. His face is lined. His jaw is square and unshaven. There’s nothing to say. Francis crosses his arms and tightens his lips against the uselessness that might spill out if he’s not careful. 

“Don’t be like that.”

“Oh? Tell me, James. Tell me how I am supposed to be?” How should he be? This table is reserved. This show is sold out. Show’s over, folks. Nothing there for you. _For me. I don’t get to keep you, don’t remind me._

“I don’t know what you want from me.”

A bitter smile tempers the edges of his mouth. _What do I want from you? Too much. Far too much._ For a moment, he allows himself to linger on it. He wants his fingers in James’ dark hair, brushing it back from his face and pulling his neck to the side. To press a kiss on the divot of that throat, to suck a plum-colored bruise into his clavicles. To lick the salt of the sweat and the sea from his brow and to lay James down on his narrow bed and run his greedy hands over the rises and falls of his body. Or, better yet, consider that James might push him down instead. Yes, imagine those dark eyes, the ones right here and staring perplexed instead being filled with heat. God, what a change it would be to be desired. Wanted. To be invited into someone’s bed, to fuck anything other than his own fist. In his imagination now and his nightly fantasies, James holds him firm and flat upon the mattress, crouching between his spread thighs and sucking the come out of his cock with a hot mouth. 

Francis’ skin is very flushed. 

"What do you want?"

One pale brow arches. _What do I want? Everything. Nothing. I want you in my bed. I want to hear I love you from your lungs, even if I have to steal the air myself. I want to wake up with you on Sunday mornings, split a peach for breakfast. Honey in your tea. I'll offer you a pomegranate seed, just the one. Make you a Devil's deal, just to keep you one night a week. You think you know me. You’re always wrong about me._

Francis turns back to his drink. These are the dullest of secrets. He is only a man. A man with a dyspeptic stomach and an ache in the spine. A man with hair on his knuckles and bitten cuticles too. His thin hair spills out across the grey pillow. His cock aches. Leaks. He rarely reaches for it, rarely indulges himself. _I want to be better than this. I don't want to need this, to be tied to this body, locked here, as base and simple as anyone. I don't want to want you. (To need you. To need anything. Never that.)_ Look at him, just human after all, his drawers shoved down around his knees, his nightshirt hiked up his chest. His cock in his tight and flying hand, slick with his own pent-up ache, already spilling out and god it's been weeks, _do you have any idea how I need this? How I want you? What I think about when I'm alone with myself and there's no one, finally no one, to watch me stumble? Look at me, making a mess in my own bed, thinking of the anger on your face, the way you stepped close to me and raised your jaw. You shouldn't get that close, stand within six inches. Shouldn't raise your face like that, your chin in defiance. Don't you know what you're doing? (You could have been kissed.)_ Each night, thinking of James, he comes on his own fist, as he always does. Look at him, a sweat-soaked ruin, falling apart in his own bed.

Pathetic. 

"I want nothing from you," Francis snaps. (Lies.)

"No?" James turns, his eyes dark. "Well, I want something from you, as your Second." Francis looks up, shifting uncomfortably. Anger in his mouth and heart beating with a staccato fire against his ribcage. "Quit the whiskey, quit the drinking. You're half-soused morning to evening and completely gone by night. You are the commander. Command, for God's sake."

"I'll not listen to the likes of you."

"Well," James hisses. "You'd better find someone to listen to. The man I read about, the Captain Francis Crozier from Parry's memoirs. From James Clark Ross' memoirs. You're not him. I know that now, shame I didn't see it sooner."

The door shuts firmly behind James. Francis stares at it with blinking, whiskey-soaked eyes for a long time. 

He wants another drink. 

He _wants_ but pulls his greatcoat on instead, ascending slowly to the upper deck.It is dark out. November is steeped in darkness, each day's light growing shorter and shorter. It will not be long before they lose it entirely. A month, perhaps. He leans against the gunwale, into the night and the snowfall, thinking of a third dark Christmas in the ice. This one will be different, stripped of Sir John. Francis will have to give a service. He groans softly.

"What's the matter with you?" Blanky asks, drawing near and frowning. 

What is the problem? Nothing. Nothing is always a concern. Nothing, nothing, nothing. There is nothing on the back of his throat, nothing at the door. Nothing in his heart replicating and filling him, deadly as a heart attack. Nothing is a bomb, sitting in his arteries, waiting to detonate. 

He breathes in, shaking the thought away. "Only recalling that I should have to give a service at the Christmas holiday this year. The men have suffered enough hardships, they don't need to add my oratorical skills to them."

Blanky laughs. "Wager you ten quid and a report, Irving'll do for you."

"I'll not take that wager, though I mind to keep the report." Francis quirks his mouth and his brow. "Well? What of it?"

"Ice's backing up, thickening and pushing inward. It'll only grow over the winter, as more freezes. Reckon we might expect a summer same as the last." Blanky pauses. "And the one before. Even Moses couldn't part that ice."

"Goddammit.”

" _Terror'_ s tilting more too," Blanky continues. The wind whips his gunmetal-grey hair about his face. "The pressure ridge is getting worse, not better. We'll be arse-end over tits before long."

"Christ, do you have anything that isn't accursed news?" Francis leans over the railing, looking balefully up at the unanswering sky above.

"At least it's a nice night."

“Hah," Francis shakes his head. "I used to take comfort in them, the stars. Anytime, no matter where, if you could see the sky clear and weren’t half-crocked in your logs, you could know exactly where you stood. Now, look at us, what good is knowing when you can’t do a damned thing about it?”

The stars gleam above, indifferent and unchanging.

"Captain," a voice interrupts. Two lieutenants, red-cheeked in the cold, rubbing their hands together in their gloves. "You're needed below. It's the caulker's mate, Mr. Hickey."

"Stealing, sir," Lieutenant Little says, his eyes dark. "From _Terror_ 's larder. Lieutenant Irving caught him." 

Francis nods slowly, blinking. Exhaustion deep in his spine. "Bring him to my cabin. Has Captain Fitzjames left yet?"

"Aye, sir. Nigh on ten minutes ago."

"Go fetch him, will you? Captain Fitzjames and I will question Mr. Hickey below directly."

“Captain," Lieutenant Little says, his shoulders set in a hesitant hunch. "When a ship is lost, a full court-martial is technically required.”

“Bring me a map, I’ll show you exactly where we are,” Francis snaps. As if the coordinates of their position were not exactly as they had been for the past fourteen months. As if Francis had not written Lat. 69°37'42" Long. 98°41' in his log every unthawed day. As if this position were not seared into his memory eternal. 

* * *

All of _Terror_ crowds the lower deck. Francis stands at the front, James just beside. Punishment is never done in private. Not aboard ship. Not here.

The whip cracks.

"Again," Francis says. He wishes he hadn’t touched a drop tonight, that there was no echo of liquor on the back of his tongue.

_(The first time, his father and the belt. Leather on air, cracking loud enough to echo. The belt travels faster than the speed of sound.)_

"Again."

_(Age ten. An open palm against his skin, leaving a red mark. The millet still spilled across the floor. Stop crying, his father says. Be a man.)_

James is watching him. James is always watching him. Francis feels hot and furious, strange and embarrassed.

"Again!"

_(Thirteen, the last time. The belt again, the crack of the blows sounding out to his heartbeat. There’s still hay in his hair and the taste of the baker’s son’s skin in his mouth. His father wrote to Captain Staines of the Hamadryad the next day, seeking placement for his wayward son. Francis never argued. If you must live by someone else’s rules, it’s better if they’re spelled out.)_

"Enough." His eyes glossy and wet. He blinks repeatedly. Blood seeps into the cracks of the lower deck. He stands silent before nodding to cease the blows. They've given the caulker’s mate twenty-two lashes in the end. The count of mercy is eight. As the man is helped to sickbay and the murmurs grow louder in the room, Francis clears his throat.

"The _Terror_ may be at risk, men. She sits on a pressure ridge which is becoming precarious. Any crew who would like to berth on _Erebus_ until the situation has resolved may do so. Those of you who remain aboard will be permitted to trade up a quarter of your rations for extra grog. That is all."

The murmurs pick up again, Francis doesn't stay to listen. He heads for the Great Cabin without another word, the weight of this frozen nowhere balanced on both shoulders. Where are you, Heracles? Where are you idling? Take the world for a moment, just to stretch these shoulders out. 

(A memory, his mother. Her hand on his back, pressing the damp strips of cotton to the hurt. There had been little song in his home but his mother had sung him to sleep. Had brushed the hair back from his child-face and the worry from his brow. “You will write to me, won’t you?” She had asked when he’d gone. “You’ll keep yourself safe?”)

At the door to his bunk, Francis slows, dropping his forehead against the doorjamb. _Terror_ pushes back against him, solid and ever-present. He rubs a thumb over the woodgrain of the door, knowing each dip and divot, each pattern and whorl. _Terror_ doesn't pull away.

"Francis," a voice comes.

 _Please God, not now._ No luck. No prayer. One eye blinked open shows James Fitzjames standing next to him, his mouth half-parted and brows drawn into an expression of worry Francis has never seen directed at him before.

"What now, James?"

James seems to chew the inside of his lip. Francis watches closely. Too closely. How large is the space between them? Something seems too much, too near. _Bring me a map, something to measure. I'll show you exactly where we are. I'll show you how you're too close. Be careful of coming so near, you might be kissed._

"Are you well?"

Francis gives a short laugh, incredulous and quiet. He shakes his head. Strands of limp hair fall in his eyes. James tilts his head, watching closely. This is strange. This is dangerous. Francis' heart beats as loud as a confession, threatening to break out of his chest.

A warm hand falls on his shoulder and squeezes. It doesn't leave immediately, lingering like late summer. As bright as a sunrise. A little piece of the world propped up. Francis wants to reach for the hand and cover it with his own. 

He does not; this is dangerous enough.

"Get some sleep," James says quietly, close enough to gust warm breath over Francis' ear. "Please."

When James has gone, Francis thinks only of him.

Consider measurements.

You cannot take an accurate measurement until you know the boundaries of a thing. Upon our first encounters with the sea, when we had looked out to the horizon and saw it had no end, we then assumed that it faded off into forever. Despite impossibility, we have never stopped trying to measure. We know the edges of our oceans now. We can add up coastlines and depths. Sea level to the Challenger Deep, the nuance of inlets and bays. Seas can be measured, yes, we know their boundaries. The sky proves more difficult. Our great explosion out into the nothing, into the beyond. We cannot contemplate where space ends. We try but there is no true demarcation. We can only look at the speed of the race, the laws of the game. Who knows if the rules change out there, somewhere past the horizon? It is not ours to know. We cannot measure it.

The easiest way to measure something is to pick it up and see how it weighs against us. That’s weight. Gravity, our obligation to the earth. Instead, to see the size of something, the volume of a thing, we pull it out and pour a bit of water into the space left behind. Take that water and funnel it into a graduated cylinder, see how high it reaches. When we fall in love, we cannot know the edges of ourselves, our margins fly off into the distance, far out of reach. Instead, we can only see the emptiness burnt into our bodies, our hearts. The hollow, cavernous spots left, like a wound after an abscess. Pour a little water in, a little blood. Fill it up again, these gaping wounds. Into a measuring cup, see how high it goes.

That is how much we have loved. We can compete with it then, the known measures of our wants and aches, our desires and loves. We can say, _objectively speaking_ . We can plan divorces and breakups, match lovers. If you have 5.4 kilograms of love to give, we should find someone with the matching vacancy. At the courts, this old breakdown, we can say, _but your honor, she only loved me 12.6 kg and I loved her 17.8_. Approximately speaking. (Perhaps it is good that we cannot measure.)

It goes like this.

Captain Francis Crozier keeps ship's hours. He sleeps at midnight and wakes at four o’clock. He takes the world in over tea and one stale biscuit. There are some exercises and ablutions, his uniform dutifully laid out by Jopson. His joints ache in the morning. His hair, clipped short and thinning, is shot through with iron at the temples. He is still strong, still barrel-chested, yet his square-fingered hands have sunspots now. His knuckles are knobby and gnarled, dusted with a fine bit of reddish-blond hair. His eyes are pale and blue, his brow constantly arched in sardonic amusement. The lines on his face are deeper. He has grown older. Here he is again, on another morning, just the same as the one before, daring to eat a biscuit and measuring out his life by coffeespoons. He will sit at his table reading and rereading the damned reports, waiting with a tapping foot. Waiting for his steward to catch Captain James Fitzjames on his warpath. Waiting to hear James ushered in, bluster and blushed fury on his cheekbones, his sharp, straight nose, knots tied by the wind in his hair.

James will blow in like a storm through dry grass and scatter the papers to the ground. And Francis will let him because Francis loves him. He doesn't know who to pray to. The gods make slaves of us all.

"Damn it all," he tells no one but _Terror_ above, silent and devoted. "I love him, don't I?"

When you love someone, you say it. Give it a voice, give it a name.

Go on, speak the words.


	8. Chapter 8

_Rose Hill, Hertfordshire, England  
_ _July 1821_

Between the wide meadow and the long, sunlit rooms, between the hen house and the narrow creek beyond, Rose Hill is, and has always been, the ideal place for an ideal summer. James loves the way the grasses scrape against his arms, the way the English sunlight kisses his face. He loves the way the doors and windows of the great house stand open like wide arms, patiently waiting for James and his brother Will to be driven inside again by nightfall and mosquito bites. The late sunsets leave them to linger out long past dinner, crossing sticks as swords and building rafts of fallen logs, sending them along the small creek. 

“Aha!” James cries, his makeshift craft knocking into his brother’s leg. “I’ve discovered you.”

“You can’t _discover_ me, I knew I was here already. Discovered myself.”

James frowns, trying to force an argument, then lets it go. "Be grand to go to sea. You'd get to see everything, go _everywhere_. Imagine being a captain. Lord, Will, I'd give anything." A life without boundaries, without edges or definitions. He has always envied the nameless birds, watching in his wingless body and bound to the earth. Each autumn, he watches the flyway of the birds, winging off to warmer climates. His thin hand on his horse's bridle and two feet always on the ground. 

It's a simple dream, to listen to the birdsong and dream of leaving with them. 

"Would you really wish to go?" Will asks. 

James looks at him. He has dark hair, like James, and dark eyes, like James, yet there is nothing in them of similarity beyond that. Will is small and pale, quick to a cough and nervous. James has never met a tree he would not wish to climb. 

"I'll go if I'm sent," James says at last. Simple as that. Will nods. No one in the Coningham family has ever been sent to sea but neither child is a blind fool; they both have seen requests carried out in regards to James that have not come from within the family but without. They both know that _Fitzjames_ is not a Coningham name, even if they don't know who it might come from instead. James has his suspicions. He has never met the man he believes might be his real father, a Sir James Gambier, though he has lingered in hallways and cupboards long enough to listen to whispers and pull the threads of his own tapestry out of the air. Another man, a quiet, reserved gentleman known as Admiral Lord Gambier, would visit Rose Hill from time to time, always seeking James out to see how his growth and progress had come. For a time, James had imagined this man to be his father. An Admiral, accomplished in wool and decorated in metal, who knew the sea better than the land, legs sturdy on any surface. 

"I hope they don't send you," Will says, picking at his fingernail. James says nothing, not wanting to disappoint his brother. Something of the Royal Navy calls to him. The sound of adventure, of a future untethered to this steady place, always and ever just outside of its society. The sea doesn't care for a name, only how well you rig a mast or tie a knot. He thinks of water and it feels like holding his breath, as if he might be waiting for his life to start. He wonders how it would feel to put on a midshipman's uniform, how it would feel to walk up to the docks. If his first ship would be waiting there, holding out a plank to him, saying _we've been waiting for you, what took you so long?_

Yes, they might not send him, but James rather hopes they will. 

The sun is growing long. They pick their way back through the meadow and wildflowers, heather and heath. James, always the one with quicker blood, ambles ahead, by turns looking under rocks and picking up very fine sticks while he waits for his brother to catch up. This stick, a broken branch as long as his arm, does as well as a rapier. He sets a crabapple upon a stump and parries, slashing at the fruit. It falls to the ground, rolling off somewhere unseen.

“Aha!” James says to the apple-less stump. “I’ve got your head.”

(Every child once dreams of being a hero.) 

"James!" His brother cries. James glances back. His brother on the ground, spread out akimbo. He turns to see a leg that should not be at that angle, blood smeared on the grass. 

"Oh Lord, Will," James' hands hover over the broken bone, his fingers shaking. He tries not to look at his brother's terrified and paler-still face, looking younger than he had in years. "Don't move, I'll get help."

He runs. The back door grows nearer. The sun glints off the windows of Rose Hill. He’s breathless by the time he tears through the kitchen and into the parlor. 

"James, stop that," his aunt admonishes. "Don't run in the house. You know better than that. Where have you been?"

At a second, James can feel his skin grow cold, a strange chill taking the place of air in his lungs. William is sitting at the table, practicing his letters. He looks up at James with those same, ever-familiar dark eyes, his brow dipping in confusion as James blinks at him. His leg, his very same leg, is whole and sound. Nothing broken at all.

Nothing shattered, nothing lost. 

“Pardon, Aunt,” James says softly, backing away. “Got excited. I think I’ve left my - my hat. I’ll be right back.”

He turns around, running back over the field, to the spot where Will had fallen. The picture is fixed and exact in his mind. A memory, not imagination. He had not imagined the pained expression on Will’s face, the sickening twist of his leg, the bent grass beneath his body. He had not conjured the heavy breathing and pale skin of his brother, laying in an unmoving heap on grass and heather, reaching out with an inadequate grasp for James or for Rose Hill, only the sky above to listen. 

He had not imagined it but the grass is unbent and the meadow empty. 

No one waits for him here but the birds.

* * *

_HMS Terror  
_ _November 1847_

Dark seems deeper here. The shadows are longer and blacker, the nights uninterrupted by casual light from streetlamps and windows. Here, as winter closes her grip tighter and the ice presses in further still, the nights have nothing of light but the unmoved stars above and the fires they burn. Even the fires are cooler and smaller, more and more braziers left unlit as the coal stores grow smaller yet. Cold and dark, a stygian nightmare. James wonders sometimes if this is how shipwrecks feel on the ocean floor, shivering nails and boards like numbed bones, left in the bleak blackness of deep water. Sailors with no way to sail, a ship with nowhere to go. This is the dark of his childhood, the endless black nothing of beneath the bed or an open closet door. The dark of an unlit attic, the black swallow of a cellar. Places you shouldn't be at night. At night, you should be in your bed, safe and sound. 

He walks the half-mile ahead to _Terror_ , the snow digging into his slops, one uneasy eye kept on the sky. Aboard ship, raised voices spill through the Great Cabin's closed door. One unmistakably Yorkshire, the other tauntingly Irish. James enters to find a red-faced Francis glaring at a resolute Tom Blanky. The way Francis' stout fingers clutch at the whiskey bottle between them leaves nothing to the imagination as to their argument. 

( _"He cannot command in this state,"_ James had insisted, hot-eyed and biting his words short. 

_"Captain, let me be the one to talk some sense into 'im,"_ Blanky had said. " _It'll be easier, comin' from me."_ )

Francis stares at him for a moment, blank-faced and blind. Then his features screw up into a wretched scowl. "Oh, God. Get off my ship!

"Francis - " James says. His slops and hair are wet with melting snow, his cheeks roughened by the cold. 

"Don't ever call me Francis again," Francis hisses, leaning forward in his chair, elbows on his knees. "You'll call me what I'm due to be called."

James glares. _Due to be called? You're due to be called nothing but a failure, a disappointment. And right now, a liability._ "You stole sixteen bottles of spirits from my ship. I don't know what you're due. I do know there hasn't been a single meal we've shared, a conversation when you weren't morbing on about what you're due. Your luck has changed, Francis. No one has you in harness any longer." James steps closer. His heart is wild and dangerous, a rabbit kicking at the bone cage of his ribs. "You are commanding this expedition _entire._ So damn your eyes. What else do you require? Respect? Well, earn it. Or are you determined to be the worst kind of first as well?"

They are mirror images across the room. Each of them breathing roughly, eyes bright and hard and staring, staring each other down in challenge. James glares at the pale, alcohol-glazed eyes, he blazes at the way Francis is gulping at the air, swallowing it down (he is doing the same). 

Have you ever felt the world give way beneath your feet?

Throughout human history, there are epochs. They are reference points, marking the sudden shifting of time, from period to period. In James' life, watching Francis' crossed arms, the square hands twitching restlessly on his coat, this was one of them. _I want you._ It races through him faster than wildfire. He pauses, halfway to the table. Francis cocks one bitter eyebrow at him. At James, still breathing hard and gaping with his mouth open like a codfish. _What the fuck?_ It doesn’t matter, the thought cannot be unthought. He has always considered them to be something of magnets. Perhaps too similar, if placed near each other, he and Francis, they will repel and fly backward. You cannot push them close together without flashing eyes and a gnashing of teeth. This was a simple fact. What he has forgotten (there are always tiny details, fine print) is that the polarity of all magnets can be reversed. It doesn’t take much, a simple electrical current will do. James finds himself hooked up to a battery, attached to a solenoid coil and laid on a slab of stone. The current pulses through his body, wave after wave, starting at the crown of his head and pulsing down to his fingers, his toes. The polarity switches; he cannot look away.

Everything has shifted. James shifts a little too, uncomfortable in his own clothes. He leans on a glare, gritting his teeth and looming nearer to Francis. The punch, when it lands on his cheekbone, Francis’ fist against his zygomatic arch, is unexpected. James staggers backward, reeling and cupping one hand against the blooming pain. 

" _Francis!_ " Someone cries. James looks up. Lieutenant Little and Blanky have Francis by the arms, shoving him away and against the wall. Away from James. Away from trouble. 

"Get off me!"

"Sit down!" 

"You be careful now!” Blanky warns, his voice sharp. “Or what happened to John Ross at Fury Beach will happen to you."

"Everyone, out." 

"Francis…" The way Blanky says his name sounds like an omen. A threat. 

"Oh, go smoke a pipe, Thomas. Or better yet, go stare at the ice. I want a full report in an hour. That's an order."

"Francis - " James glares, a vicious heat in his throat. 

"Not you, not now," Francis mutters. "I need air." He shoves his chair back roughly from the table, making for the upper deck. _Don't you dare think we're done here. I didn't come here to let you get away with this again._ James doesn't hesitate, pressing close behind Francis as the captain tries to slam the cabin door shut. He follows Francis up the stairs. His slops are still wet, his hair wild. His cheek aches, the memory of the blow still lingering in his skin. 

Francis stops short. 

"What in the seven Hells - " James mutters. He pauses then, looking around. The upper deck is silent and still. Nothing stirs, nothing moves. A thin layer of snow and ice covers every surface and verglas gleams from the frozen ten-spoke wheel, all as if no one living had walked upon this deck for decades. Eely shadows slither over the floorboards. Something flickers from above and James looks up. The sails in the wind, all tattered and wind-torn. The dark seems closer here. There are no fires to scare it away, no one to stir it up. Look how the dark settles, like ink in plainwater. This dark seems different from the night. Night comes and goes, night is easily frightened off by a torch or lantern. This sort, the one that lingers like grease, is the one we’re always worried about. We came from the dark, we will go back to it someday. Someday there will be a dark not even a fire can brighten. 

This is that dark and dark is the night.

A sound, boots scrape against the wood of the deck. Francis reaches out, his expression strange. Half-bewitched. His hands seem to seek _Terror’_ s railing. 

"Francis," James says quietly. A shudder goes through Francis, he looks back at James and then to the deck. James doesn't need to ask what he sees, the horror of their absence lives in his eyes too. 

"Get below," Francis says urgently. "Get below _now._ "

James starts to turn around, looking over his shoulder. Francis isn't following, somehow transfixed by the nightmare above. Francis moves, taking a step forward. Forward, not backward. Not to safety. 

He doesn't think. He only reaches one long hand out, gripping the back of Francis' coat, and pulls. 

They fall in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. The hardwood floor of the lower deck presses punishingly into James' shoulder blades and elbows, threatening bruises to come. Francis is sprawled atop him, the firm weight of his body both too much and a relief. Solidly secure, solidly safe from whatever strange barrenness had found them above. Francis coughs, pushing himself up on his elbows and there's nothing of embarrassment in that familiar face but terrified worry. Perhaps it is the drink that has pushed mortification from his mind, but Francis' ice-blue eyes flit over James' face, his brow furrowing deeper with something like concern. A rough hand touches James' jaw, turning his head gently to and fro, looking him over for bruises and broken bones. One thumb brushes over the dark, angrily-red mark on James' cheekbone, a souvenir not of their fall but from Francis' fury alone. 

James' mouth is dry, he cannot explain the look on Francis' face. He does know that Francis' mouth looks very soft. He does know the shape of the heat inside of him, staring at the part of Francis' lips, the damp swipe of his tongue to wet them. James' heart beats in panic, his body stirring in his trousers, pinned by the weight of Francis' too-too-solid flesh. Francis pushes off, onto his knees, breathing heavily. Several men clatter about, wondering as to the commotion. Blue wool of the seamen and officers, the red wool of marines. Lobsters, all of them, red and blue alike, just waiting to be boiled. Francis signals to his steward. 

"Gather Dr. MacDonald and Lieutenant Little, Jopson. Captain Fitzjames and I shall be in the Great Cabin. I have - " Francis blinks rapidly, as if trying to clear an image from the red rims of his watery eyes. "Something. Something to speak to you all about."

* * *

The Great Cabin seems smaller than usual. Claustrophobic. Four men sit, clustered around a mutual, growing desperation. Francis doesn't look at them, only sitting hunched in a chair, hands together and an occasional grimace twitching his mouth.

James sits very still. There's blood on his jaw, a split lip. He knows his eye will be purple and swollen later, like a forgotten plum left in the bottom of a bag to rot. Knocked around. Kicked around. 

"I'm afraid I need to ask the four of you for a favor that will likely be a great imposition. And... There couldn't be worse timing, I understand." Francis stares at the floor, drumming his knuckles against the table. "But there also couldn't be a greater need." He pauses and looks up. The smile that twists his mouth is self-loathing; James recoils to see it. "I'm going to be unwell, gentlemen. Quite unwell, I expect. And I don't know for how long. A week?" Francis grimaces, shaking his head slightly. His lank hair falls in his face; James' hands twitch, aching to reach out and settle on Francis' shoulder and to brush the strands away. He keeps his hands firmly locked in his lap, as still as two ships cast in ice. 

The dark presses in against the ship; James casts a glance backward, feeling as if the night were peering in on them, spying through the windows.

"No," Francis continues. "Two. Perhaps - perhaps more. And not only must you draw the tightest possible curtain around what is happening, but you must also _care_ for me as well… as I will not be able to care for myself."

"You needn't worry for a thing, sir," Jopson says. James and the good doctor share an uneasy, knowing look.

"I will be in no position to command. That will be for Captain Fitzjames, for all things. And you must be my proxy here, Edward."

"Francis - " James says. 

"No," Francis interrupts him. "I'm sorry, but we mustn't stop until it is finished. _I_ mustn't stop, and you mustn't let me. I may, I may beg you." Francis looks away, some color painted across his throat. Red. Red as a confession. Red as a mistake. _What is it?_ It’s hard to say, hard to tell. James has always been good at hazarding a guess, knowing where to linger, where to press his luck. He swallows and weighs the apology on his tongue. Too clumsy to polish up, to offer on outstretched hand. Instead, he watches Francis and sits idle, tangled in his own heartstrings, strung up like a noose on Gallows Hill. 

Francis wets his mouth once more with the bottle and hands it to Jopson. "Take this out to the firehole and pour it out.” 

He doesn’t say goodnight when he leaves them, closing the door to his berth. James fidgets in his chair, the weight of command heavy. Is this how Atlas felt, kneeling to bear the Earth on his back? Is this how Francis had felt last June, watching Sir John’s blood stain the ice? It would have been easier to bear if he had looked away. If he had not looked up to see the netting of sweat and grime on Francis' damp forehead. The lines around his eyes and the bags beneath them heavy enough to pack the entire world into. 

A blazing pride engulfs his heart, lit upon like charcoal. _You'll get through this, Francis. We'll get you out the other side. Y_ __ou’r_ e beautiful. You shouldn’t be beautiful. But you are. To me. _

(There are things James knows not to say.) 

* * *

"Do you need anything, sir?" 

"No," James says, brushing the exhaustion from his face. "Just sleep. Thank you, Mr. Bridgens."

"Very well," Bridgens nods, straight-backed and gentle as ever. "Sleep well, sir. I'll be by in the morning." 

"Of course. Good night."

"Good night, sir," Bridgens says, pulling the door to the cabin firmly shut behind him. 

James nods, biting his lip. He pours a drink and pours himself into his chair, pulling his journal close to him. Halfway full, packed with letters and asides, jokes tucked into lines and gently ribbing observations. Portraits and landscapes, ink washes and line drawings of the ships in the ice becalmed. Typically, James always fills each page, packing letter against letter and scribbling into the margins. He drinks from the tumbler, Scotch whiskey washing against his throat, and flips several pages forward. This page is blank. He spreads his hands over the page, bending it to lay flat against the desk. Dips his pen in the inkwell. 

_To whoever comes after, should this be found:_

_If this is ever found,_ he thinks, chewing on his own tongue. Somehow, James has the heavy weight of awareness that it will never be. Remember the look of the empty deck, the snow and the ice left alone under the same moon. The same stars beating down from above, the same stars from every night in human history. From before us and after us. The same stars that have heard every cry of joy and fear and offered nothing but their indifference. Nothing but silent witness. What had they been shown? The future? A parallel time, already dead? A parallel time, already saved? It's impossible to tell. That's the trouble with glimpses, with incomplete information. But this journal, no one will find it. At least, not until he is long dead. There is a strange freedom there. James has never written exactly what he has meant to. Half the art of storytelling is knowing what to conceal. 

_If this is to be my last will and testament, let me open it by telling you this. However history has remembered Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, it is not enough._

Not enough. Francis is worse than he will be remembered; Francis is better than he will be remembered. 

He sketches a memory of the captain’s profile. The limp hair, the skin around his eyes tired and drawn. A fierce stubbornness in the pale eyes. The soft bend of his mouth, lips forever set in a quirk, as if ever on guard against a smile. 

How would such a mouth kiss? Absent the rest of the man, his exhausted eyes and nervous hands, how would this mouth kiss if it were a mouth alone? He tries to divide and conquer his want, reducing it down to essential parts. That mouth, ever expressive, in kissing would be focused and steady. He would pick apart James’ lips like undoing a sailor’s knot, fitting his tongue into the spaces that give, dark and willing. 

But a mouth cannot exist alone. Even as he tries to ignore the remainder of Francis, ghosts of capable hands brush his throat, coaxing a breath from him. 

James again, once more spelled to ruin. 

Attraction. James shifts in his chair, remembering the feel of Francis' body above his own. Other memories surface, half-understood but seen now more clearly. A dance on the ice, a hand at his waist, deftly tying a bow in his ribbon. James hasn't forgotten the feel of his hand in Francis' as they'd danced, the strange thrill in his skin at the proprietary touch. He had assumed it was only his own need, a want to be wanted. Now, he's not entirely sure. He doesn't even know if Francis has inclinations this way. The only time Francis and love have been spoken together are with two lovers: Sophia and _Terror._

A woman and a ship, the two most appropriate lovers a captain might ever have.

Love. It has a strange feel. A strange weight. James mouths the word _love,_ turning it over on his tongue, unfamiliar with the shape of it. He has known of love. His family at Rose Hill, the clap of his brother's arm. The laughter of friends. The love of touch, freely and easily given. But this, how do we describe this love, the sort that by turns claps us in irons and sets us free? His hands shake, his heartbeat gallops. James might laugh, he might cry, shaking his head at the absurdity of it.

This isn't _love_ , certainly. It can't be. _Desire,_ he thinks. _It's just a foolish desire._ Love, James is certain, does not begin with a shiner upon the cheekbone and knocked to the floor by a man with rheumy eyes and sour, whiskey-laced breath. (He tries not to think of the determined set of Francis' jaw as he had laid out his intentions. The half-drunk, half-terrified shake of Francis' hands, the sharp shame in those same eyes as he had glanced over James' bruised cheek. What is the point of love? Why does it exist? He needs to know, to find out. How did love happen? When did we tip on over into experiencing love? When did _he_ ? Have we always? Is it new? When did it first evolve out there, as we wandered through the desert? If it did evolve, somewhere between us and our prokaryotic forebears and their wine-dark sea, there had to have been a first. There had to have been the first human to bear this genetic weakness, this evolutionary misstep. There had to have been _someone_ out there playing catch by themselves with their bitter heart, tossing it against a wall. What was it like then, back then in the past, when there had been only the one lover and their heart condition too?

Love, if this is love, is bitter and awful, tasting like orange juice and tooth powder and stuck to the roof of his mouth. It doesn’t matter, he can ignore this. Of his story, he can cut this part out too. Emphasis and excision again. 

Remember, a scene left on the cutting room floor. He has been to a whorehouse once. A long time ago. Age sixteen and prodded in the back by the big thumbs of his uncle, two thick fingers spiking between his shoulder blades.

_Pick one, boy. Go on._

He had hesitated, loathing the moment. But to stay silent would give away his inversion. So he'd done as his uncle asked and picked a woman who reminded him of the Jack of Hearts. Behind closed doors, he'd promised double the coin should she let him sit by the fire for a half an hour and thump his uncle on the back with a good tale after. 

They’d shared a pipe. He remembers that now. 

This is when he began to learn how to shape himself in others' minds. It's simpler than you might imagine. Belief is ninety-nine percent suspicion. We mostly only look to confirm our own theories. So James leaves clues to let others sketch their images of him, letting them color in the spaces he's already carefully constructed. James is a storyteller. He has nothing to offer but tales so he practices his craft, weaving the truth in and out of embellishment and omission. There is always, deep down, a relic of fact. Heroes always start their own rumors and sing their own songs. Someone has to tell the tale and no one will do it for you. So James does, spinning them out of word and letter. 

Remember again, another edit from James' life. A boy, fallen in the water. James remembers how the Mersey River had swallowed the boy whole. His brown leather shoes, his calves, his soft blond hair and crucifix. It was ravenous and gobbled the child with white froth and eelgrass, curled around his ankles and pulled. _Come to me,_ it had said, like Grendel’s mother pulling her down to her lair. James tells the first part. The shock of the fall, the inhale of the audience. The waves and the open water. He tells the last part too. The child laid out on the ground, coughing the seawater from his lungs, reaching blindly for his mother. Pale, yes, and alive. He leaves out the middle. The long stretch of the middle, the bracing cold of the water, the terror of his hands reaching out and still touching nothing. Empty empty empty. The salt had burned his open eyes, the fear had been ice in his blood. The long middle of nothing. _Searching searching searching, please let me find you. Please still be breathing. Please still be warm._

No one listens to a hero's stories for the middle. Just the once upon a time and the ever after. So he leaves that part out. What story will he have to tell if they ever leave this place? It's impossible to imagine. The beginning, yes, how they left from Greenhithe, how they paused in Disko Bay. The end, whatever end they might come to that would allow a story. 

Not this, this is the middle. This is the part crossed out.

James sighs. He gets up and goes to the door, finding Bridgens in the pantry. 

"Yes, sir?" 

"Three bells. I'll be over to _Terror_ early," James says. "Will you wake me at three bells?"

"Certainly, sir. Is everything - " Bridgens hesitates. James watches him swallow, wanting to tell him to quit with his duties and find the hammock of the young man from _Terror_ who now berths here. A Mr. Peglar, mild and beautiful. To bring him a book and brush his hair back. Tell him a story. "Is everything quite alright?"

"It will be. It shall, yes," James says, only half-believing it. "And will you bring me a book? In the morning, that is? Something to read to someone ill. Something -" he pauses. "Hopeful, Mr. Bridgens. Something hopeful."

"Of course, sir." His grey hair gleams nearly as well as the silver he's polishing, one rag in a careful hand. 

"Something you might read to … someone you cared about. A family member. A dear friend. A - husband, perhaps, or a wife." He doesn't look his steward in the eye. Men of certain inclinations have always known each other in the dark; James knows he is terribly obvious. He is no blind fool.

"I know just the thing, sir," Bridgens says. His voice and expression, when James dares to look, are very gentle and very kind. The sparse light from the lanterns catches in his grey hair, unearthly and spectral. James looks at his own hand where it rests on the sturdy doorframe of _Erebus_ ' pantry, half-expecting to see nothing. Half-expecting to see a shadow. _This thing, this vision we have seen tonight. The ships abandoned and devoid of life. What if that vision is the truth? What if we are already dead and do not even know it yet?_

He chews the inside of his lip, biting down till it hurts. Biting down till he tastes blood. 

Does a ghost always know he is dead?


	9. Chapter 9

_December 1847_   
_HMS Terror_

The voice is kind.

Francis feels as if he is drowning in the depths of it. Some voices are as thick as honey and wine, some as gentle as milk. The notes from this tongue wash over him like a warm bath. Does this voice sing? If not, then it should. Francis can not fathom a world in which this voice might not be joyful. The voice stays late into the night, long after the brazier has cooled.

Francis is very warm.

* * *

The sheets are damp beneath his body and his mouth tastes like cotton. He tries to look around. His eyes are open but the colors will not cooperate. The world shifts in indeterminate shadows and light. He closes his eyes again; they are no better open. Nothing to see. 

“Jopson,” he murmurs, unaware of anyone is near enough to hear him. His voice sounds weak, even to his own ears. He wonders if he’s spoken at all or only imagined that he had. “Jopson,” he tries again. 

No one comes. Or perhaps they do, he was simply not awake enough to notice. 

You can’t wait around with your eyes closed. If someone looks for you, you have to call out.

* * *

Shadows and light again. 

Is there someone there? It’s impossible to tell, shifting from dream to reality and back again. Sometimes the dreams seem sharper, the grass more familiar than the same oak walls. 

Someone is reading to him. Francis cannot make out the words but the baritone voice is as steady as a current, washing him out with it. He blinks one eye open and thinks there is another set of eyes looking back at him, both very dark. As dark as the curls that frame the reader’s face. 

His mother had had dark curls; Francis remembers this. 

“Beautiful,” he says, staring at the hair. The reader stills, their finger at the edge of the book, ready to turn over a new page. 

“Francis?” 

But Francis has drifted off again to dreams of Scylla and Charybdis.

* * *

Let me tell you about her. His mother.

She said the stars had gotten his birth wrong. Francis was born in the fall to earth. She had said he had too much water in him. That he was too hard to pick up; he would always run through her fingers. She had expected another earth sign and he had lied to her instead. She'd gone a bit mad. Maybe it had been in her from the start. Encoded there, woven into her DNA like a Doomsday clock, ticking down the hours. You don't know how long you have. Francis bites the inside of his cheek and remembers his mother. Dark-haired and pale-faced, she had put damp cloths on his forehead when he had been a child sick with scarlet fever. 

His forehead is damp again now, though she is dead and gone. Who is putting them there?

“Don’t ever fall in love,” she had told him. And he had tried his best.

_I am sorry that I fell in love with you._

Is it though? Sometimes he is not quite certain. He can go for entire minutes, hours, afternoons without thinking of James. It could get longer if James wasn’t present so often. Should James be kept at arm’s length, then surely Francis would grow to forget him. Perhaps love is merely a habit of familiarity. _Do you feel the same?_ It is impossible to tell. He flits from clipped words to kindness. In the past months since Franklin's death, Francis has grown gentler with James. Allowing him in. He swallows. _I had always thought I’d fight against my own ruin. Not fall in love with it._

They had loved each other once, his mother and father. Francis keeps that memory close to his heart, curled up around it like an oyster cups around a grain of sand. He tells himself that he is remembering love, yet sometimes he wonders if he is only remembering that love fades. His mother and father, the half-closed parlor door and raised voices. His father and flowers that went to another house, who slipped back into Avonmore House in the dead of night, when everyone was supposed to have been long asleep. Why did the love die? It was a question he had never dared to ask. Now, both of them long buried, he’ll never know. It’s infuriating, not knowing. His father had had a severe slash for a mouth and put tradition first. Francis is five when the schism comes. His father, with a half-silvered reddish beard and a Bible tucked under one arm, had been a Presbyterian man, and Francis had been baptized as an infant, holy water poured upon his brow. “Deliverance will come from faith in God alone,” his father had assured the family at each juncture. His father was a man who prescribed Scripture for every hurt.

Did you scrape your knee? _And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven._

Did you act in anger? _A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls._

Did you forget who you belong to? _Then take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery._

They had become Anglicans when Francis was five years old but the Good Book didn’t change and the empty cross was still to be found nailed to the green wallpaper of their parlor. To a child, God is painted in broad strokes, the nuances don’t matter. Francis knows God is watching and that someday, somewhere, there will be an accounting done.

His mother had liked to tell him stories, usually legends and myths of the nearby hills and dales. Francis liked the stories of heroes best. Finn MacCool and Cuchulainn, Lugh and Conall Cernach. She had told him a story once, from her own girlhood. _I saw a banshee as a child,_ she had said. It was a horror story, the woman who had risen from the sea with hair as black as grave dirt and a mouth as red as a fatal wound. Francis had been tucked into bed as she told him the story, more nervous about the shadows beneath the bed than of any monsters in the sea.

“What are they?”

“They’re spirits, love,” she said. “They foretell danger. And death.” She liked to stroke his hair with her hands, brushing it back from his face. Most of the other children had grown too big to be told stories and had their faces wiped clean, but Francis lingered. He rarely was given sole attention, he liked this, having her undivided love.

“What did you do? When you saw her, mama, what did you do?”

“We were supposed to go into town that day.” Her face had looked absent, half-swallowed in memory. For this, she was not with him but somewhere else, far away and long ago. “The horse was young and not well-broken yet. He - “

“Did it crash?”

“Yes.”

“Did someone die?”

She had paused, then shook her head and the memory off. “Now, don’t you trouble yourself with that. Young boys! Always so bloodthirsty. Next, you’ll be wanting to hear about Rome again.” (Francis’ mother had been fond of her Bible and fonder still of her stories, bringing Daniel and his den to life, describing the way the bones had stuck between the teeth of the lions.)

“Ma, please.”

“Look at you, you’re too much like me,” his mother had said. “Promise me now, you’ll follow your heart. And swear, should you see a banshee, you’ll heed her warning.”

He wants to tell his mother that he has tried but that wherever his heart has gone, the roads have been closed. Iced over.

There’s a metaphor there.

How many years has she been gone? He tries to count them. Is it 1847 still or 1848? The weeks run into each other, some he wakes, others he does not. Ten years then, nearly ten years.

Funny how quickly the time goes.

* * *

He wakes to the sound of voices. Both familiar, if unnamed. Both beloved in different ways.He shifts in bed, his body exhausted. 

“I’ll return tomorrow, to read some more.” This baritone strikes strangely in Francis’ heart, as if each heartstring was tightly wound and a song being played upon it. 

“Yes, of course, captain.”

“How goes it, Jopson? You’ve been very - devoted.”

“Dr. McDonald believes he’ll pull through, sir. He has the captain on a low diet, just gruel and grog, so that the fever might not be stimulated further.”

“Does he eat?”

“A little. Not as much as Dr. McDonald would like. But he does, sir, yes.”

“Will he be bled?”

“If the fever worsens, I believe so.”

“After this, you deserve a week of rest.” How long has it been? What day is it? Or week? For that matter, what time is it? He wonders which watch is on duty now, gathered at the capstan for their four hours on deck. Who is mending the sails now, who is swabbing the deck?

“I’m happy to serve the captain, sir.”

“I know you are. I do, truly. Do you suppose he recognizes - any of us?”

“I don’t know, sir. It’s impossible to tell. Sometimes he’s nearly lucid, other times not at all. You should get some rest, captain. You’ve been here all day.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” There is hesitation in the tone. “Jopson, if he - “

“I’ll send word at once, sir. Day or night. For better or for worse.”

Someone brushes Francis' hair back. The fingers are long and rough.  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Francis,” the baritone says. The reader then. Francis breathes him in. Floral macassar oil and the iron tang of ice and salt. Wool and paper. When he drifts off to sleep again, he takes the scent of the man with him, curled up around it like a blanket.

* * *

_Once upon a time, a hero was born. He was called Finn, for he was fair-haired and bright-eyed, his blush as red as his mouth. He walked and fished, preferring his own company to anyone else’s. A poet had told him that there was a fish in this river, a salmon with cherry-red flesh, that would imbue perfect knowledge on those who consumed it. Finn was preparing the fish for the poet Éces when he burned his thumb and put it in his mouth to suck the pain off._

_Then he knew all. The wisdom was his own._

_The trouble with wisdom is getting anyone to listen to you._

* * *

The voice has returned. The first voice, rich and vibrant. Francis imagines that this is what light might sound like, were you to capture it in a bottle or amphora. He squints, frowning at the shadow of a man in a chair next to his bunk, the book open in his lap. (For a moment, he imagines that this is the muster book for HMS _Terror,_ he remembers signing his name on the first line. Signing his name and life away. Where is that book now? Somewhere in the depths of Barrow’s halls, one of the last pieces of his name left on the trail.)

James is reading to him of Circe and her isle of pigs. Francis blinks his gummy, red-rimmed eyes open, to see James perched in the chair beside him, tightly squeezed into the small berth. His hair catches the light, falling over his shoulders. He wears the cream gansey again, as he has often done in recent months. Francis likes the look of it on him, softening the edges and sharp planes of his face.

Several minutes pass before Francis realizes James has ceased reading.

"Does it bother you?" James asks quietly.

Francis shakes his head. Or tries to.

It must have worked. James nods, clearing his throat and picking up the book again. The lamp is bright. The fire in the stove is bright. To Francis' feverish eyes, watching the illumination catch on windows and glassware, they look like stars. He wonders if he could pick out the constellations that frame James. If he could place him in the stars. James belongs somewhere beautiful and eternal, somewhere where the cold and spoiled rations will not touch him.

Sealed up then, like a letter in a bottle. Something with dark green or amber glass, where exposure will not spoil him. Somewhere safe, somewhere where no one else might drink from him until Francis might have his fill. Somewhere, truly, safe from even Francis himself.

* * *

_Finn is forty years old the first time he sees the bard. Taliesin has black curls and skin that browns in the sun. His voice sounds like a song. All at Tara hush Finn when Taliesin speaks, opening his mouth once again to tell the same stories, over and over and over, always a little more embroidered. A little more invented._

_“Tell us about your spilled soup,” Finn says, grimacing over his ale. “That’s a capital story.”_

_Taliesin stares at him from across the table, his long hands still primed on his dulcimer. How old is the man? Perhaps twenty, no more. Finn should know to hold his temper with a boy scarcely cut from his mother’s milk. He should know better. He has slain a fire-breather and built the Giant’s Causeway, yet this man with his radiant brow and shining words makes Finn feel ruddy and small again, embarrassed and strange._

_It’s impossible with Taliesin. Finn fumes and does not know why._

* * *

_James._

He dreams that he is searching. The sky is white and the ground is white and clean, as if it had been freshly holystoned and left to dry. Like the sea at night, Francis cannot tell where one stops and the other begins. He is walking and walking and walking endlessly. Shale and limestone crunch beneath his boots. Fossils crumble beneath his weight, bones that have laid here long enough to be committed to stone, now undone by Francis’ inexpert stumbling.

There is no one around. The land is as empty as his vision of _Terror_ ’s upper deck had been, covered with a thin layer of ice and devoid of life. The only movement there had been the mainsail in the wind. Here, it’s only the clouds and the wind again.

_Where are you? Where have you gone?_

In his dream, Francis pulls a fur hood tight around his face. His nose ruddy from the wind and the winter cold. He walks and the terrain shifts into mosses and lichens, then the taiga itself. Birdsong lives here. Something rustles in the wood. A fox, white-furred and nervous.

Why is Francis here? Why is he looking here?

_James, where the hell have you gone to? Why can’t I find you?_

Then blue, a wide expanse of blue. The Pacific stretches out, glittering and endless. The deep still waits for him, here at the end of the world. 

* * *

Unsaid things have weight. 

Shadows catch in James’ face. Funny how, only now alone with Francis, does James seem unbothered if Francis is looking. His shoulders slump and exhaustion runs trails on his face. It shouldn’t make him more beautiful, quietness and sadness, yet it does. What is it? The realization of that we are, at core, only human. Once, Francis had thought James to be only a parody of flicked hair and empty-hearted performance. But no one lives emptily and James’ hands shake faintly, unsteady and tired. 

Still he reads. If he notices Francis watching, he says nothing. If he notices Francis looking, he doesn’t change a thing. 

There is a gulf between. An ocean left uncrossed. Not yet, no. It’s better to float here, in this half-imagining of James. In these half-formed daydreams of a James that would not flinch, would not turn away. A James that would look past his pockmarked skin and unwashed face.

 _How does it feel? How does it hurt, if you reach down inside yourself? I want to know the taste of it, the exact balance and viscosity of the humors of your body. The blood and the spit, the tears and the bile. I want to know if mine are the same. How does it feel? There is a shape of melancholy inside of me and I am trying to tell you about it. The color, the edges, the density. Tell me, tell me if it’s familiar. Tell me if you feel the same. Look down, look beneath the atom dust, look beneath the meat and bones I have been saddled with. I am not my body and my body is not me. I am asking for something else, I am asking you to understand the holes in the spirit. I am asking you to hold your own up, see if there’s a match._ _Who shot you, James? Does it still ache? Does it still pull at you when you bend? When it rains? Would you show me? I’ll strip down to nothing, just ribs and veins, and show you mine. I won’t laugh if you don’t. I can be brave enough to keep a straight face. I can be brave enough to not look away._

He drifts off on the sound of James' voice, listening to Odysseus find his way home.

* * *

_“This is the heartland of Rheged,” the bard says, looking out the window with wonder over the green hills that flow and undulate like a sea. Sunlight beams down from above, the hallmark of happy gods and lucky men._

_“Why don’t you ever stop talking?” Finn hisses, stabbing an apple with his knife. The blade goes through to the wood of the table below._

_Taliesin blinks, looking at him. “It’s who I am,” he says. “What else can I do?”_

_“You might choke on the words,” Finn grumbles. They’ve had the misfortune of becoming traveling partners, passing through the British countryside. Here, Finn is no hero. They do not know his name, only the bulk of his shoulders and the awkward shift of his hips. His tongue is wrong here, too fat or long to make the right sounds, his accent a betrayal. Strange and Irish again, ever unwelcome._

_Taliesin, for all his bluster, looks hurt. “I can’t wait to be rid of you,” he says._

_Well then, Finn can’t argue with that._

* * *

James sometimes goes off script, editorializing and filling in around Homer. Is this how he reads alone as well? Imagine James’ shelves of books, how if Francis might take one down, he might find endless marginalia and observations in James’ elegant, looping scrawl. Francis never writes in his books. He never cracks the spines, never dog-ears a page. Never underlines a passage that strikes his heart, never circles a line that sparks in his blood. How has it become a virtue for him, to live without remark? To live without interruption? Francis tries to stain nothing, to disturb no waters. To leave nothing of himself after.

Nothing even now.

Is that why James is terrifying? There, crossing his legs, reinventing Odysseus. How much of his own self is found there? How much of him might be seen if Francis had a defter hand and might peel away the thin layers of reality and invention? This fact, worst of all, that James Fitzjames lives to be seen. To be remembered.

Why is that terrifying? Why?

James bites his lip in that way Francis has learned is common to him when James is troubled, buying time between his words. Between the lines. His lines. He wants to reach out. There’s no whiskey to blame. No ale to blame. Nothing here to scribble it out, to white out this bare fact of wanting. James’ shoulders are slumped and his eyes are tired; Francis wants to offer his arms like parentheses and cup James within.

 _I see you,_ he wants to say. But his mouth does not open. To speak would be to trouble the water. Francis never troubles the water.

Instead, he listens.

“You know, I never imagined that I might live past thirty. Truly, I thought that bullet was meant to get me. I know this is your least favorite story from your very least favorite himself but, frankly, right now I’m all there is and you’re dead asleep.“ He stares at the wall, as there might be something hidden in the solid English oak walls of _Terror._ “Wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself when I lived. Now though,” James shifts in the chair, crossing and uncrossing his long legs. One hand brushes his hair back, lingering at his hairline. “Doesn’t matter, does it? Not anymore.”

He remembers that once a scholar had told him that there are languages with no past and no future tense. That the concepts themselves did not exist and thus were never required by language. The speakers inhabited a constant present, their past and future sewn up together with them. They were not without past nor without future, not completely, but in weaving the past and future into the present, lived with them more fully than any other.  How might that feel? To not be envious of a future without us? To not be held hostage by a past imperfect? How would it feel to live side by side with our whole of time with no judgment and no hurry?

If he reaches out, what future might there be?

* * *

Light and shadow again. That must mean another day passing. A fever takes him and Francis twists in his sheets, scrabbling at his bunk. Images manifest. There are penguins in his curtains, there are birds in the ceiling. There is a whale head affixed to the side of the ship, weighing them down. There is a dead albatross around his neck, dragging him down. 

The fever breaks. Francis breathes and Jopson sings quiet songs in his steady voice, placing and replacing the cold, damp cloths on his forehead. Dip, wring, pat, repeat. At some point, consciousness returns and Francis surfaces to the feel of James adjusting his pillow, frowning gently. 

“I spoke with Mr. Blanky yesterday," James murmurs in that steady voice. "Of John Ross. Of what he’d said to you regarding Ross. I’ve seen things, Francis. Battles. War. There was a time when I came above deck to see a man holding his own arm, shot clean off by a damnable cannonball. Blood everywhere, just - sickbay looked more like a butcher’s place than any sort of hospital ward. But that wasn’t the sort of horror you meant when you said ‘You know what men are like when they are desperate’, was it? It’s something slower. Worse. A darkness, Mr. Blanky said.” James swallows. “He supposes we might vent it, this … darkness. What would you do, to give it air? Stab the balloon with a knife, so to speak. Let it out.” James sighs. “I wonder how Odysseus motivated his men through ten long years. We’ve no sirens to speak of. No Circe. What pleasure can we find - “

What pleasure indeed?

James shakes his head, sighing. He blinks his eyes against exhaustion, wrinkling his forehead as he does. “Do you know the last time I laughed - truly laughed, that is, and meant it - was that night we danced our fine quadrille. You’d laugh to hear it, thank God you’re dead to the world right now and shan't remember a thing.” James’ hand comes to rest on Francis’ forearm, somewhere both wholly appropriate and wholly thrilling. “It’s … cathartic, I suppose, to speak to you like this. Like going to Confession, not that I have in … years, really.”

Imagine a youth with wide, dark eyes looking upward at the sky, wondering where they fit into the story. Where they belong on Earth. Begging the author, begging God, _tell me where to go._

Francis breathes. The words filter through like sunlight reaching the deep twilight of the middle ocean. He cannot understand the fullness of them, he is not yet awake enough. Perhaps later, when he is awake and fully conscious again, on the upper deck in full uniform. Then he might remember. 

Those long fingers drum against James' thigh as he speaks. 

“At least I can give them this, something to keep with them. A little bit of joy. A Carnivale. If the last is something I still - well,” James pauses. “It will be a long walk. And you - “ Francis imagines he can see the Adam’s apple of James’ throat dance as he swallows. “If you - when you get through this, you’ll be there to lead us. And I’ll be right damned if I didn’t say that did not give me some measure of comfort. A dram of hope. I don’t - I’ll never understand you, Francis. How you got to this, and how you can just throw out all of it. Pour out all the bottles and claw your way out. You’re _impossible._ The most stubborn, irascible man I’ve ever met. I wanted to know you, you know, since your Antarctica escapades. I wanted to be introduced to you so damned much. You went everywhere, saw _everything,_ The south. Pitcairn and it’s John Adams. You were a fellow of the Royal Society at _thirty-two_. In magnetics. How the devil was I supposed to live up to that? I still - still don’t know why Barrow gave that to me. I was so - and then we met and god, Francis, I simply wanted to punch your bloody teeth out.”

Francis remembers. He had kept to the edges like wallpaper, one hand tight on his glass and an uneasy eye following Ross and his new wife around the room. 

“I tried with you. I honestly did. Well, until that embarrassing route toward Greenland and, Christ, I can’t believe you let us go on in the wrong direction. Did you have a laugh about it? You did, didn’t you? I could have strangled you. Could’ve strangled _myself._ I’ve never been so mortified in my life, swear on my honor and to God alike.”

At one point, Francis knows, that would have given him great pleasure to know. Now it’s sticky in his spine, he wants to dig the knowledge out. To reach out and soothe that twitching hand on his own arm. He tries to move his arm but it doesn’t follow.  _What if we’d met somewhere else? What if we’d lived other lives in other houses and at other times? Is there a world that existed, that will exist, where none of this would have mattered? A world where you would have said hello and I would have taken your hand and held it close? A world where our homes were not broken coffins of ships, where nothing was sinking, where we did not sit hungry on a pressure ridge - a world where I invited you to dinner and you drank wine with your steak, a world where we danced and I kissed you after and you didn’t push me away?_

“Francis - “ James isn’t looking at him, not exactly. From behind his half-closed eyes, Francis can see how James is both looking at him and looking past him, lost somewhere in the dark of his mind. Memory again, memory always. “I shouldn’t have come. I don’t know why I’m here. Who I am. If I hadn’t - that day where you suggested wintering on the other side of King William Land, if I hadn’t argued, would it have come to this? You were right and I, in my wretched hubris, in my _godforsaken need to be something better,_ didn’t listen. I’ve damned us all. You would have - “ James cuts himself off, his mouth pressed into a thin red line. “We’ll all die here. And it’s my name at the reckoning.”

He picks up the book again. Francis wants to say something but there’s a wall of cotton between them, his mouth isn’t working. Is James’ brow shining? Hello Taliesin, tell me a story, tell me how you got here. Tell me how you became yourself on your own terms, by what you took from the world when they gave you nothing.

Faintly, somewhere between waking and sleeping, the voice continues. It might have been James’. It might have been Taliesin’s. It might have been his own, telling him stories he wishes to hear. “Sometimes I lie awake and think about all the choices we’ve made, everything that’s just gone so blasted wrong, how it might have been different. Maybe we wouldn’t be here. Maybe you and I wouldn’t - well, some other world perhaps.”

Some other time.

* * *

_“This is your story. Your history,” Finn snaps. “Not mine.”_

_“Finn,” Taliesin asks, his fingers slowly picking at his instrument. His dark eyes look up, a strange color midway between moss and amber. “This isn’t my history. I’m not English.”_

_Finn doesn’t want to ask. To ask would mean to be answered and Finn does not wish to know more._

_“Where are you from?” (Why did he ask?)_

_“I grew up in Aberdyfi, at the court of Elffin ap Gwyddino. I was his ward.” Taliesin paused, looking away. “I never knew my family.”_

_Odd what we envy. Finn had grown up surrounded by family, choking on tradition and fettered by genealogy, wearing his father’s name upon his back. Yes, he might envy the other man, save for the lonely shadows of his face._

* * *

A damp cloth is put to his forehead. Wetness spills from his face to his neck to the bedsheets. He cannot tell if it is water or sweat. It does not matter. Not now. Light streams through the open door from the Great Cabin into his berth. Day, it is day.

How many days have passed?

He cannot tell.

"Easy, Captain," a voice says. Francis blinks. A shadow comes half into focus, somewhere in the lower part of his vision. A slight man, with a dark five o’clock shadow and black hair falling into pale eyes.

"Is that you, Jopson?"

"It is, sir," he says. "I've been here all along."

Francis nods.

"And Captain Fitzjames, sir. He's come as well, every day."

"Every?" Francis frowns, trying to parcel out the meaning. He shifts, aware of his own shivering body. James has seen him like this, sweat-soaked and unawares, crying out about ghosts. Mortification blooms in his blood.

"Aye, Sir. He- "Jopson pauses.

“Go on, then."

"He reads to you, Sir."

"Reads to me."

"From _The Odyssey._ I'm given to understand that the book was a recommendation from Mr. Bridgens. And a little of a collection of Irish legend, he thought that might be a comfort."

"Of course," Francis rubs his thumbs against his eyes, brushing up against a vague memory of a dream. Finn MacCool had been there. And Taliesin too. He cannot remember the purpose. Doesn't matter. "What time is it?”

“Just past eight bells, sir. The quartermaster’s just got everyone up.” Four o’clock then, still dark outside. Still night. The midshipmen will still be wiping the sleep from their eyes and drying the dampness from their faces. A lieutenant will be stumbling into his boots to begin the watch. If he listens for it, he might hear the boatswain’s call, ringing out _all well._ He might hear the rush of the pipes as the cook lights fires on the stove, stirring up the day’s burgoo, a miserable concoction of oatmeal and water. “How are you feeling?"

"Like I've been lashed to four horses sent in opposite directions. You might read your fortune from my entrails, if you're lucky." He grimaces, the feeling of sick rising in the back of his throat.

Jopson brings the bucket.


	10. Chapter 10

_HMS Erebus  
_ _January 1848_

  
  


I will not tell you about the fire. Not in detail.

It is enough to know that it burned till morning; it is enough to count the names of the dead. Now, James sits in Erebus’ Great Cabin, staring blankly at the bulkhead and picking at his cuticles. His nails are filthy, dark with ash and blood. He doesn’t care. Francis wets a cloth in the basin and wrings it out. 

_("This kind of darkness… do you see it among us here?")_

“May I?” He asks. James nods dumbly. He both knows and does not know _this_ Francis. A sober Francis. A Francis who moves slowly and carefully, who gently washes the dirt and sweat from James’ face. “You were burned,” Francis murmurs as the cloth comes away from his hairline red with dried blood. He had bled before the fire but he does not say anything. Does not correct Francis’ misapprehension. Language seems a million miles away. When Francis soaks the cloth again, the water in the basin turns a murky red-brown. Neither of them mention it. James only looks away from the bulkhead while Francis’ back is turned, watching him with disquiet. There will be censure. Judgment. A lashing. He does not know when it will come. With the Francis he had known, only weeks ago, it would have come already. 

_("I don't need to see it to know it's here. You have time enough to vent it.")_

Should he ask for it? Should he speak the words? Instead, Francis has Bridgens bring him tea and some of the aging chocolate. He drapes a woolen blanket around James’ shoulders and sits with him for either ten minutes or ten hours, James could not say which. When he leaves, he murmurs something of comfort, telling James that if he needs anything, anything at all, that he should not hesitate to send word and wake him. James nods again, still silent. Blank. In the passageway, he hears the faint sound of Francis repeating his orders to Bridgens. _If he needs anything, send for me at once. Do you understand? At once._

_("How?")_

_Yes, captain,_ the steward says. 

Sometimes, he wonders about the body’s willfulness. The brain gives up but the body will not relinquish life so easily. We might lie in bed, unmoving and unspeaking, allowing no food nor water to pass our lips. But the body will take itself apart, feed on its own flesh, drive you mad for the slightest bit of rain to lick from the gutter. The heart keeps going. _No,_ you say, as if you have ever had a say with your own form. The heart sings out, still preferring this world to the next. _Yes,_ it cries. _Yes yes yes._

_(First, if you're going to keep things from the men, give them something in return. Now. Something to keep their minds on… other than what lies ahead. There will be a tally for it later when things get hard. There always is.")_

Eventually James sleeps. I will not tell you about his dreams. 

Not in detail.

  
  


* * *

_HMS Terror  
_ _March 1848_

Picture this. 

Two captains seated at an oak table, both marked up heavily by work and exhaustion. A fine mesh of lines crisscross both their faces and dig ditches beneath their eyes. The daylight is growing longer, though it is not long yet. The last bit of the day lingers over them from the skylight above the captain’s cabin.

Tonight, Francis stares at the spot on the Great Cabin's sideboard where the whiskey bottles had once stood. James does not miss it, sitting next to him with the chair drawn nearer than he should. There is some dear little space between them, yet James can still feel the heat of Francis' body through the layers of their waistcoats and knit jumpers. When he closes his eyes and breathes in, there is only the steady sound of Francis' breathing. Only the smell of salt and lye soap. Crisp wool. James still watches him hesitantly; there was a time, not long ago by human reckoning and ages ago by his own, when Francis would have dearly loved to watch James Fitzjames humiliated. _Would that those curls rot off. Would that great miserable gob never tell another tale. I’ll cut his tongue out myself, swear to it. He is a menace and a fool. Mark my own words,_ Francis had hissed once, watching James chart an erroneous path toward Greenland and saying nothing. _Ye, mark my words, Thomas, he’ll be the lad to get us all killed. The devil can have his due._ (The words had been repeated to James through gossip. There are, as they all know, no secrets aboard a ship.) The memory is as bitter as ash on his tongue. Perhaps he has become a better man in the last three years. But he is still a man. Still a fool. And there are twenty buried men to prove it.

A knock comes at the door. “Enter,” Francis calls. 

The young Lieutenant John Irving enters, doffing his hat as he does. Snowflakes litter his coat and cling to his eyelashes. “Captains.” 

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“The pantry inventories, sir, as requested.” Irving hands out several sheets of paper, each covered in a tight scrawl. Francis takes them without remark. James leans over to glance at them, his chin in his hand. His index finger moves restlessly across his bottom lip. 

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” James says. 

“Sir,” Irving starts, then reconsiders and stops.

“Well?” Francis quirks a brow. “What is it?”

“There’s talk, sir. Some of the men are proposing to abandon their orders and stay with the ships. They do not wish to walk, sir.” 

James breathes in sharply. Francis nods slowly, seeming far less surprised than James feels. 

“They are aware of the short provisions and the lack of coal, are they not?”

Irving shifts uneasily before them. “Yes, sir. Some believe that the leads will open this summer. They wish to try.” 

“That’s certain death, Francis.” 

Francis stares off, away from both of them, somewhere past the bulkhead. “Some would argue that walking is also certain death. Thank you, Lieutenant, we will consider this.” 

Irving nods and offers a quick half-smile, his dark hair falling in his pale eyes. “Lieutenant,” James says as he makes to leave, “You spoke at the last Sunday Service as to wrath. God’s punishment.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What we have encountered, here in the ice, is that divine retribution? Have we - sinned in some fashion? Or has God just forgotten us?”

“We cannot know how God works, sir. You must hold fast. Even the saints were tested.” 

James nods, feeling faint and strange. Irving nods and closes the door firmly behind him when he leaves.

"So we walk," James murmurs. There is a coin in his hands. He turns it over three times, watching the little lantern light gleam from the metal. The ghost of the word _glory_ is heavy in his mouth. Once, James had sought a command of his own. But there is no glory here, nothing for him. Nothing here but dead men. Perhaps he would have married, if things had been different. The idea, no matter how much he reaches for it, no matter how desired, seems false. He has heard husband and wife so many times, he cannot seem to make sense of husband and husband. It seems fake. Like a knockoff. A cheap imitation of the real thing.

A lie. 

"Yes, we walk," Francis nods. He twists the mug in his hand. Since Francis has abandoned drink, James does not drink around him. The tea is warm in the mug, though the miserable chill steals the heat too quickly. James stares with grim eyes at the little heat in his own mug, wondering how much warmth he might take with him. _What is out there for us? What’s waiting at the end, out beyond the pack?_ "If it is to be a choice between Scylla and Charybdis,” Francis says, “then I suppose we've a better chance with Scylla."

"Do you think - " James starts. He pauses. "Fort Resolute is eight-hundred miles away."

"And I am far too well aware, James," Francis says. His mouth is grim. James glances away, toying with the rim of his cup. 

"What do you suppose you'll do? When we return, I mean."

"Reckon a hot bath would do me good."

"And then Miss Cracroft? Will you suppose a third attempt?" His voice is light and he smiles, but the set of his brows is tense. 

"You presume she is still at home."

"I envision a regular Penelope,” James says, attempting to keep his tone light. “The good woman weaving and unweaving her tapestry and listening for her hero returned." He thinks of Sophia Cracroft, who charmed everyone. She was sly and witty in conversation, her fine-boned hands flitting wildly about as she talked. There was talk that her hair had inspired a man’s poem once. A sonnet, perhaps. Well-read, well-connected, well-spoken. She would go to the opera with Francis and there, in front of God and man alike, openly take his hand. A puff of air blows on the jealous ember of his heart. 

"I do not know what I picture of her anymore," Francis mutters.

“Hmm, yes,” James murmurs. “If she’d been on this expedition, you’d get to know her well enough to either loathe her or love her, there’s no in-between, is there?” His laughter dies as their eyes catch. They each shift uncomfortably in their chairs.

"Is _this_ what you wish to speak of?” Francis snaps, suddenly irritable. He closes his eyes, breathing in slowly. When he opens them again, the lines of his face have smoothed. “Let us leave Miss Cracroft to her own devices, shall we?"

James nods. The silence grows long and loud.

"Tell me a story, James," Francis says at last. “One I haven’t yet heard.” It could be a tease but not with that soft kindness. It’s half-infuriating how gentle Francis is now, sober and bright-eyed. James cannot account for him. 

He flushes. There are words. There are stories. They jumble together in his mouth and get caught in his throat, flailing like a fish in a net. When they are unimportant, words seem to spill easily from James' silver tongue. But a true story, something to tell the man sitting across from you, holding your beating heart in his own chest - how do you do it? Like steering a ship through ice, knowing when to break and when to pause. When to drop the anchor. When to start again? He doesn’t know. He touches the cross on the chain around his neck. It had been a midshipman’s, entrusted to him as the sailor had closed his eyes. _I’ll keep it safe. I’ll find the passage. You won’t have lost so much for so little, I swear to you. I’ll make the Passage, no matter what sort of damn fool I must drag with me. I swear it._ There is a half-image of Francis Crozier in his mind, watching him with pale blue eyes. 

When he opens them again, Francis is standing and has stretched one hand out. James quirks a brow. 

“Dance with me,” Francis says. James glances about the cabin. Empty but for them. No one would see them. Still, he swallows and looks away. 

“There’s no music.”

“That’s alright.” 

“It’s - we shouldn’t,” he murmurs. And it’s as close of an acknowledgement of the strangeness between them that either of them has broached. He shifts in his chair. When he looks up again, Francis has not moved, his hand still extended, though his eyes have grown fierce and hooded. James has wondered if he had been imagining it, all this time dancing around each other. He is not imagining it. 

“James, we are about to walk _eight-hundred_ miles hauling thousands of pounds behind us. I believe some impropriety can be spared tonight.” He pauses. “Only a dance.”

 _Only a dance._ Somehow that opens up a world of promise. _Only a dance_ implies that there is more to discover. Somehow James finds himself standing and being pulled against Francis’ body, one strong arm wrapped about his waist. Francis sways to a silent rhythm, pulling James along the canted floor. Somehow his head finds itself resting on Francis’ shoulder, feeling the heat and strength of the other captain radiate through his coat. 

“Francis, Jopson might - “

“Hush,” Francis whispers, tightening his grip on James’ lithe form. “Jopson will not mind and will say nothing.”

“How do you know?”

“He is the very image of discretion.” Francis pauses and glances at James’ worried brow. “Just trust me, James, I know what I am doing.” James nods, somehow comforted and discomfited at once. When has Francis not known what he was doing? If they had listened - if he had listened… (Further, deeper yet, James trips over the certainty in Francis’ voice of Jopson’s discretion. A picture flashes on the back of his eyelids. This very room, this very berth connected, had it found another James in Francis’ very same arms? Had James Clark Ross’ auburn curls instead held this very same spot? Does Francis still make room for him? James does not know and cannot ask.) 

He gives in and takes Francis' hand, standing in the circle of his arms.

 _I love you,_ he thinks, with all the certainty of a neophyte. He pushes his nose against Francis’ coat and inhales. That steady sailor scent anchors him. Iron salt and damp wool, the ever-present scent of lye soap and oak too. A comforting vibration surrounds him as Francis hums a tune both familiar and forgotten. 

“Now about that story.” 

James shakes his head. “Would you believe me if I said I’d forgotten them all?”

“Not in the slightest,” Francis says, pausing. “Tell me what you’ll do when we’re back.”

“What I’ll do?”

“Where will you live, what you will do. Would you stay in London?” 

James closes his eyes. "No, I don't believe I'd look in London."

"Oh?”

"I grew up on an estate in Hertfordshire near Abbot's Landing. Rose Hill. I suppose I've always figured I'd go back to something like that when I was settled."

"Hertfordshire then."

"Well," James says, considering. "Not specifically. But somewhere with open air and good land. I've considered deep Kent. I'd like to be near the water." Yes, the easy country of Kent, he thinks of how the chalk hills roll up to the English shore. "Of course," James continues, "It wouldn't have to be England."

"Oh?" 

"Scotland would do. Or Wales." James hesitates. "Or Ireland."

“I can’t picture you in Banbridge,” Francis says, his tone laced with dark humor. “Too quiet.” Imagine it, James’ baritone in the hallways of Avonmore House, his gleaming curls against the green dales, his skin darkening under an Irish sun. “I never expected us to be good at this,” Francis murmurs. “It surprised me.”

“This?” _This_ could mean a very great many things. 

“Dancing.”

“Ah,” James nods. “I imagined that you’d trod all over my foot at the masque. But you didn’t.” Breathe, breathe in. _Come run away with me,_ he thinks. Where will we go? Somewhere else. Anywhere but here. Think of this: a garden in Hertfordshire under a bright sky. A long walk along the Thames. Two men laid out in a broad brass bed, spilling claret on soft white sheets and laughing it off. Run away, get away from this place. Francis’ rough palm is against his own and James focuses on trying to commit every bump and callus to memory. It had been like this before, but different. Once, a year ago, James had laced a corset and danced a quadrille with Francis on Erebus’ deck. Francis’ beard had been gold stubble then, just as it is now. His arms had been warm, yes, just as they are now. But then, a year ago, they had been different people and there had been so many eyes on them. 

Now, now, he’s not sure who they are. Only that he is half-dissolved. Only that Francis has a different, gentler voice. Now, now, there is no one watching. Not in this room, the door shut and only the stars to peek in. 

His heart races. 

“I resisted every temptation,” Francis agrees. “Though it was sorely tempting.”

“You cad,” James says, his voice very fond. It’s terribly warm in here, isn’t it? He breathes in. Is Francis smiling? His voice had sounded amused, his hands are very warm and damp. James wants to know and pulls his head from Francis’ shoulder, looking at his partner. They both still. He has made a mistake. It is well-understood that a dancer should never look directly at their partner during a dance, save when they wish to be kissed. Have they stopped? James hears nothing but his own heartbeat and the slow creaking of Terror’s beams. 

“Francis,” James says. 

Francis drops his hands, taking two steps backward. His hip bumps into the edge of the table. “We can’t.”

He wants to cry. To scream. To push Francis against the wall and kiss him to shut him up. He wants to take Francis’ hand and press it to his hairline, begging just one indulgence before it’s too late. He does none of these things; instead, James stands very still, his hands in furious fists at his sides, taking the blow. 

“Of course,” James manages at last, the oxygen punched out from his lungs. He runs a hand through his hair, trying to pull himself together. Where is that unflappable creature he has tried to build? Where is that bright thing, that beautiful man who has never known misfortune? That man with no great depths, so that nothing might reach them. Never drop your shield; something might get to you. That’s the first rule, James Fitzjames. You should know better. Your mother put you down and never picked you back up, your father never came for you. You know rejection too well to have put yourself in its way again. The knife had twisted in his gut and never come out. Abandonment is like a bullet lodged in the base of the spine. It never comes out, we simply grow around it, cover it up with flesh and skin, hair and bone. It stays with us, carried from place to place, a parcel of ache. We might live forever with it, caught up by sturdy sinew, this isolated bit of lead. Or the shrapnel might break off, travel deeper still. Might kill us in the night. He’s bleeding still; luckily, this sort of blood doesn’t stain. 

(I want to put something broken before you. I want to feed you something bitter. You’ll try to spit it out, to wipe it on your pants. This is for the first time. Eight years old and in his bed, shivering in the spring chill. His blankets kicked to the floor. _Your parents left you with us,_ his aunt had said. _And we love you, James, never forget that._

 _Will they come back?_ James had asked.

 _No, my dear,_ his aunt had said sadly, holding him tight. _I’m afraid not._

The blankets on the floor. James had thought that losing a parent should feel cold, so he had stripped his bed himself.)

“James - “ 

“It’s fine, Francis. I understand.” He does. This is not a lie, he truly does. 

“When we’re - when we’re out of this - “ 

“Francis,” James says, his voice as bitter as aconite. “Don’t make promises you cannot keep. This - “ He spreads his arm wide, sweeping out over the wide windows and the pale everything beyond. “This. We’ll not come out of this. Not all of us.” 

“I will carry you to Fort Resolute myself if I have to.” 

James shakes his head and laughs a strange laugh. “You’re him. Christ.” 

Francis frowns. “Who?”

“The man in Ross’ memoirs.” _The one I wanted to meet._

“James.”

“You’re right,” James sighs. “We need a captain right now. We need to be focused. The lives of -” He doesn’t think of the smell of canvas on fire. He doesn’t think of the race of flame along the top of a tent. He doesn’t think about the Britannia costume he had peeled from his body after and dropped down his seat of ease. _Good riddance,_ he had thought, watching it flutter into the dark. He inhales. “The lives of all of us depend on that.”

Francis nods slowly. James picks up his hat from where he’d tossed it on the table. 

“I’ll see you in the morning, Francis,” James says, squaring it on his brow. “For the command meeting.”

When he leaves, he can feel the warmth of Francis’ sturdy arms long after. 

* * *

_I love him,_ he thinks, sitting on the edge of his bunk, head dropped in miserable hands. A loud creak comes from the ship surrounding him, like Jonah in his whale, listening for digestion.

And there is again, the word _love,_ writhing like eels in his hands, slipping from his grasp. He stumbles over his words, spilling out metaphor and color, trying to fill up the empty bowl of the word. The trouble is that you want to know love. The trouble is that you beg _tell me the truth_ and that we assume there is a truth to tell. Love is a wide word and my love might be pale or dark, the word love itself tells us nothing. Instead, we must wall in around the word with descriptions and limitations. _I love you deeply,_ I might say. _I’m half in love with you,_ you might say. Do you mean what I mean when we speak the word love? Language is as slippery as an eel and just as ready to bite. Language is like teaching colors to the born-blind. How do I know that the concept you hold as love is the same as my own? Is there a pure definition of love, transcendent of experience, that we all might derive meaning and explanation? Or is it instead simply what we have cobbled together of our own experiences and desires; my love is a carmine and yours a scarlet. Similar perhaps, but never quite right.

In a previous version of this story, crossed out, I told you how James had come to love once. How James, drawn and dark-eyed, with cheeks too thin and spindly fingers, had learned that love is a splinter the body heals around. In a previous version of this story, I betrayed him still more. Remember him as a boy, looking hopefully toward the bright sky, the setting sun, that horizon that might be his own, if he could only stretch his fingers far enough. He wonders about love. True love. Does it exist? It’s easy to think about, out and alone on the water, where the night darkens both sky and water so deep, you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. To believe there is a great love waiting for you promises a someone on the other side. Love sits like a weight at the edge of the world, drawing everything toward it. James feels himself drawn, though he doesn’t know where it leads. He may not know the name of this true love, but he can feel them out there, shaping the curves of his life. _I wonder if we have met over and over and over again. How many lives have I found you? How many have I missed?_

He has always wanted so much; he has always been so certain he would get there someday.

He pauses, head still held in his twitching fingers. He has always wanted to fall in love and now here it is; God, how it hurts. Why does it ache, possession? Why does it hurt, holding everything you want in your own arms? Here it is, this love, heavy in your arms, and all you can think of is how it will feel when it’s gone again. What life is this? He is living on stolen moments, on little pieces of promises, inching toward a someday that might never come. Someday, it will be safe again. Someday, it will be quiet. Someday, it will no longer be interesting times. He packs all of his hopes into _someday,_ waiting for the right moment to live again.

A moment off the ice. 

The trouble with love. The trouble is that the poets lie. Love is not a fusion, not a mixture. Love is never triumphant. Love is shifting and changing always. Love is not stagnant. Look at this ship of love. We’ve replaced each board over the years. The boards, the sails, the nails too. I have loved the skin cells you had when I met you and those you have now. You are not who you were, replacing yourself little by little, growing into someone always new. I love you in a living way, pulling up the flooring and the wallpaper, changing the sheets. _I am this now_ , you say, and I light a new candle in my heart. Love does not require separation. Consider the saint, living in blissful wholeness. Love of self, love of God. Desire is separation. Desire is the ache of the space between us. Desire is regret of interruption. Put your skin to mine, your mouth on me. Get closer, closer, closer still. I am jealous of the air between us. Get rid of it, push the emptiness out of our bodies, fill it up with each other instead.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Please, come here, fill it up.

James Fitzjames is thirty-four years old. He sleeps on his bunk at incline of eighteen degrees on a ship forced into strange angles by unrelenting pack ice. He is tired. Everything bears down upon him and he groans under the weight like a ship in a storm. Old boards do not weather saltwater as well as new. As he lays in his bunk, he watches the shadows scratch at the walls and does not sleep. He closes his eyes and it’s dark. (How dark? As dark as what Jonah saw, inside of the whale.)

Shh. Sleep now. 

It’s a long walk home.


End file.
